The Glass Village

Four...

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” said Ferriss Adams, standing before the twelve campchairs, “I’m not going to make a long speech. On trial for his life before you is one Josef Kowalczyk, who came tramping through your fine little town on the afternoon of Saturday last, the fifth of July, was here less than one hour, and left behind him a tragedy that none of you will ever forget — the murdered body of Aunt Fanny Adams, good neighbor, benefactor of Shinn Corners, from one of your oldest families, and a world-famous person.

“The question before you is: Did Josef Kowalczyk willfully, and with malice aforethought, and during the commission of a felony, pick up a poker belonging to deceased and with it beat her so savagely on the head as to cause her death?

“The People believe that Josef Kowalczyk did so murder Fanny Adams and that his guilt can be proved...”

As Adams went on to sketch in general terms the nature of the “People’s” proofs, Johnny watched the faces of his fellow jurymen. They were listening with grim intensity, nodding at every third word. Even Calvin Waters’s blank features were lightly stamped with intelligence.

Josef Kowalczyk was mercifully so occupied in trying to follow Ferriss Adams’s English that he might have been a mere spectator. The furred brows were painfully one; the bruised lips curled back over his poor teeth in the effort. When Adams sat down and Andy Webster rose, a look of pleasure passed over Kowalczyk’s face.

Old Judge Webster said: “When a man is on trial, the law says that he doesn’t have to prove he did not commit the crime, the People have to prove that he did. In other words, as you all know, a man is held to be innocent unless and until he is proved guilty beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt. The burden of proof is on the People. And proof isn’t a matter of belief, like faith in God Almighty or an opinion about politics. Proof is a matter of fact... We won’t attempt to make ourselves out lily-white angels, ladies and gentlemen; there are very few angels walking the earth. The defendant in this case is a man who, handicapped by being in a strange land and having trouble understanding and speaking our language, nevertheless has tried to make an honest living by the sweat of his hands. The fact that he’s failed, that he’s poor — poorer than any of you here — should not be held against him, any more than you should hold against him his foreign origin or his other outward differences from yourselves... Josef Kowalczyk doesn’t deny that he stole money from Aunt Fanny Adams. In his poverty he was tempted, and he knows now that in yielding to temptation he committed a sin. But even if you can’t find it in your hearts to forgive his stealing, the fact that he stole money from Fanny Adams does not legally prove that he murdered her.

“That is the crux of this case, neighbors of Shinn Corners. Unless the People can lay the murder at his door, you will have to find Josef Kowalczyk not guilty.”

But their doors were shut, locked, and bolted.

So it began.

Ferriss Adams put into the record the statement by Kowalczyk on his capture, relating his arrival at the Adams house before the rain Saturday, Fanny Adams’s offer to feed him if he would split some firewood, and all the rest of his story as he had told it to the Judge and Johnny, including his admission of theft. The statement had been taken down by Elizabeth Sheare in the cellar of the church on Saturday night, and it had been signed by Kowalczyk in a stiff European hand.

Andrew Webster did not contest.

Judge Shinn directed Adams to call his first witness, and Adams said: “Dr. Cushman.”

“Doc Cushman to the stand,” cried Burney Hackett.

A whitehaired old man with a steamy red face and eyes like coddled eggs rose from one of the spectator seats and came forward. Bailiff Hackett offered him a Bible, the old man placed one shaky hand upon it and raised the other, and in guitar-string quavers swore to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help him God.

He sat down in the witness chair.

“Your full name and title?” said Ferriss Adams.

“George Leeson Cushman, M.D.”

“You reside and practice medicine where, Dr. Cushman?”

“Town of Comfort, Cudbury County.”

“You are the Cudbury County coroner’s medical examiner for Comfort and Shinn Corners and certain other nearby towns, Doctor?”

“I am.”

“Did you examine the body of Mrs. Fanny Adams, ninety-one years of age, of Shinn Corners, on the afternoon of Saturday, July the fifth — this past Saturday, Dr. Cushman?”

“I did.”

“Tell us the circumstances.”

Dr. Cushman jerkily brushed his neck. “Received a phone call ’bout three-twenty P.M. Saturday from Constable Burney Hackett of Shinn Corners, askin’ me to come right off to the Adams house in this village. Told Hackett I couldn’t get away just then, I’d had an office full of patients since one o’clock and was still goin’ strong, was somebody sick? He didn’t say, just said to come soon as I could. I didn’t get away till after five. When I got to the Adams house Constable Hackett took me to a room at the back, off the kitchen, where I saw the body of Fanny Adams layin’ on the floor, her head covered by a towel. I removed the towel. I’d known Fanny Adams all my life, and it was a shock.” Dr. Cushman dabbed at his head nervously. “I determined at once she was dead—”

“At the time you first examined her body, Dr. Cushman, how long would you say she had been dead?”

“’Bout three hours.”

“And your examination took place at what time?”

“’Tween five and five-thirty, thereabouts.”

“Go on.”

“Saw right off it was a case of homicide. Fierce multiple blows on top of the head, compound and complicated fractures of the skull — it was cracked in several places like a dropped squash and the gray matter’d been smashed right into. Worst head injuries I’ve ever seen outside some bad auto accidents.”

“Could these frightful wounds, in your opinion, have been self-inflicted?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Could Mrs. Adams have lingered after being struck?”

“Instantaneous death.”

“What did you do then, Doctor?”

“Phoned the county coroner in Cudbury, then waited beside the body till Coroner Barnwell got there. We agreed an autopsy wasn’t necessary, as the cause of death was so plain to see. I signed the death certificate, then I went back to Comfort leavin’ Coroner Barnwell there.”

“When you first examined the body, Doctor, did you see anything that might have been the weapon lying near the body?”

“I did. A heavy iron poker. It was spattered with blood and bits of brain tissue and it was bent out of shape a bit.”

“Is this the poker you saw?” Ferriss Adams held it up, and the room was deathly still.

“Aya.”

“You mean yes, Dr. Cushman?”

“Yes.”

“Is there the slightest doubt in your mind that this poker was the instrument of Fanny Adams’s death?”

“No.”

“Have you any additional reason for that opinion, Dr. Cushman, besides the bloody appearance of the poker?”

“Fracture lines in the cranium, and the shape and depth of the wounds in the brain, were just such as would have been produced by an instrument of this kind.”

“Exhibit A, your honor... Your witness, Judge Webster.”

Andy Webster tottered forward. Two or three of the women murmured resentfully. Judge Shinn had to rap on his table with the darning egg he had filched from Aunt Fanny Adams’s sewing basket.

“You have testified, Dr. Cushman,” said Cudbury’s oldest legal light, “that when you examined the deceased she was dead about three hours, and you have also testified that the time of your examination was ‘between five and five-thirty.’ Can you be a little more exact about the time?”

“Time I examined?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t know’s I can. Got there, I said, a bit after five, finished with the body around five-thirty.”

“Was she dead three hours figuring from ‘a bit after five,’ or three hours from ‘around five-thirty’?”

“Now I can’t answer that,” said Dr. Cushman indignantly. “Mighty hard to put your finger on an exact time of death. Lots of considerations — temperature of body, rigor mortis, post mortem lividity, temperature of room, whether the body’s been moved — don’t know how many questions come up. You couldn’t get it to the minute, anyway. Most times you’re lucky if you can get it to the hour.”

“Then it’s your opinion that if other evidence indicated the time of death as having been, say, thirteen minutes after two on the afternoon you saw the body, that would square with your guess as to the time of death?”

“Yes!”

“Dr. Cushman, did you form any opinion as a result of your examination regarding the relative positions of the deceased and her attacker during the commission of the crime?”

The boiled eyes blinked. “Pa’don?”

“Would you say,” said Judge Webster, “that the blows were struck as Mrs. Adams faced her murderer, or as she was partly turned away from her murderer, or as she had her back turned to her murderer?”

“Oh! Facin’ him. Dead on.”

“That’s a fact? The blows were all frontal?”

“That’s right.”

“She was facing her murderer. He could not have crept up on her from behind?”

Ferriss Adams leaped to his feet with a display of fury. The question, he shouted, was not within the witness’s competence, it was improper cross-examination, and so forth. Andy Webster shouted back with surprising vigor. Judge Shinn allowed them to shout for some time. Then he calmly overruled the objection and directed the witness to answer.

“Crept up on her from behind?” Dr. Cushman shrugged. “Might, might not have. If he did, she must have heard him and turned round in time to get whacked from in front.”

Ferriss Adams grinned ferociously at Andy Webster, and Andy Webster made a fine show of chagrin. He was about to sit down when Johnny got out of his campchair and said, “Your honor, may I say something to defense counsel?”

“Certainly, Mr. Shinn,” said Judge Shinn cheerfully.

Johnny came around and whispered to Andy Webster for a moment. The jury whispered, too, angrily. Rebecca Hemus made an audible remark about “interferin’ furriners.”

The old man nodded, and Johnny went back to his seat.

“Dr. Cushman,” said Judge Webster, “what was the height of deceased, do you know?”

“Five foot five. Good height for an old woman—”

“Would you say that the wounds on Fanny Adams’s head, five feet five inches from the floor, are such as could have been inflicted by a man only five feet seven inches in height?”

“Objection!” roared Ferriss Adams; and again they went at it. And again Judge Shinn directed the witness to answer.

“I couldn’t form such an opinion,” said Dr. Cushman, “without knowin’ in exactly what position she was when she was hit. If her head was bent forward, it’d make all the difference.”

“Nevertheless, assuming deceased was standing erect with her head in the normal position, isn’t it true—”

“Objection!”

In the end, the Judge had the question struck. He was gauging his rulings, Johnny thought, more or less by the measure of the expressions on the face of the jury. Peague was writing away furiously, looking awed.

Andy Webster waved and sat down and Ferriss Adams jumped up again.

“Just to get this one point clear, Dr. Cushman. It is your opinion that a man five feet seven inches in height could have inflicted the wounds in question?”

“Object!” yelped Andy Webster.

“Overruled.” It seemed to Johnny that Judge Shinn’s reason for this ruling had little or nothing to do either with proper examination or his overall plan to foul up the record. He simply wanted to hear the answer.

“Could, if her head was in a certain position. Couldn’t, if it wasn’t.” Dr. Cushman was eying old Andy with great hostility. “Just can’t say. Expect nobody could.”

The Comfort physician was excused.

The next witness called by Ferriss Adams was the bailiff himself. In all gravity the presiding justice rose, came around his “bench,” picked up the Bible, and administered the oath. Then he went back to presiding.

“You found the body of Fanny Adams, Constable Hackett?”

“Yep.”

“Tell us what happened on the afternoon of July fifth — how you happened to find the body and what happened afterwards.”

Burney Hackett told his story. How at ten minutes after three on Saturday afternoon he had left his house to walk over to the Adams house to see Aunt Fanny about an insurance plan for her valuable paintings, how he had arrived a few minutes later to find the kitchen door open and the rain beating in, and how he had discovered Aunt Fanny’s dead body on the floor of her “paintin’ room” next to the kitchen. He identified Exhibit A as the poker he had found beside the body.

He had telephoned to Judge Shinn, Hackett said; as soon as he hung up the phone rang and it was Prue Plummer, who had listened in on his conversation with the Judge (Miss Plummer glared from the jury “box”), to inform him that a tramp had stopped at her back door about a quarter of two, Prue Plummer had refused him food, and she had watched him slouch up Shinn Road and turn into Aunt Fanny Adams’s place and go around to the kitchen door. Hackett had then phoned Dr. Cushman in Comfort, at which point Judge Shinn and Mr. Shinn ran in...

“When you first saw the body, before the arrival of Judge Shinn and Mr. Shinn, Constable,” said Ferriss Adams, “did you notice a locket-watch hanging from a gold chain about the neck of the deceased?”

“I did.”

“In what condition was the watch?”

“The cameo on the front was smashed and the case’d sprung. Way it looked to me, one of the blows had kind of missed and scraped down the front of her, hittin’ the watch on her chest and breakin’ it.”

“Is this the watch?” Adams handed it to Hackett.

“Yep.”

“Exhibit B, your honor... What was the time shown on the face of the watch when you first saw it?”

“What it shows right now. Thirteen minutes past two.”

“It was not only broken, it was also not running?”

“Not runnin’, no. It’d stopped.”

The constable told of Ferriss Adams’s arrival and his story of having passed a tramp on the road a short time before; and of how he, Hackett, had then deputized Adams, Judge Shinn, and John Shinn to go after the tramp; and of how, a few minutes later, he followed them with a posse and they captured the tramp as he ran out of the swamp beyond Peepers Pond.

“Was that the man you captured?” asked Adams, pointing to Josef Kowalczyk. Kowalczyk’s mouth was open.

“Yep.”

“Did he surrender peaceably, Constable Hackett?”

“He put up a fight. We had our hands full.”

Hackett then told of bringing Kowalczyk back to the village, fixing up the coalbin in the church cellar as a jail, searching the prisoner and finding money hidden under his clothing...

“Constable, I show you some U.S. paper money in bills of varying denominations, totaling one hundred twenty-four dollars. Is this the money you and Hubert Hemus took from the person of the defendant when you stripped him?”

Burney Hackett took the bills, shuffled through them, put them to his nose.

“This is the same money.”

“How do you know?”

“For one thing I put it in an envelope and marked it—”

“This envelope, with the notation: Money taken from prisoner Sat’y aftn. July 5 written on it in your handwriting?”

“That’s it. There were thirteen bills — four twenties, three tens, two fives, and four ones.”

“Have you an additional reason for believing these thirteen bills are the same thirteen bills you took from the defendant?”

“Sure do. They smelled strong of cinnamon. You can still smell it on these.”

“Your honor, I enter this envelope and contents as Exhibit C, and I think we all ought to have a whiff of the bills.”

The bills were duly passed to the counsel table and from there to the jury box. Everyone sniffed. The scent of cinnamon was faint, but unmistakable.

“Now Constable Hackett,” said Ferriss Adams, “you have testified that on finding Aunt Fanny’s body, you telephoned to Judge Shinn. Did you do anything between finding the body and making the phone call?”

“I run out through the kitchen door and took a quick look around, thinkin’ I’d maybe spot somebody. At that time I didn’t know how long she’d been dead. I hadn’t yet noticed the stopped watch.”

“When you say you ‘took a quick look around,’ Constable, do you mean you stood at the kitchen door and looked, or did you actually go somewhere?”

“I run across the back yard, looked in the barn, behind the barn, in the lean-to—”

“You went into the lean-to, Constable?”

“Right through it.”

“Did you see or find anything in the lean-to?”

“Not a thing.”

“You saw no firewood of any kind?”

“Lean-to was empty,” said Burney Hackett.

“Did you see any evidence whatever behind the barn that logs had been recently split?”

“Nary a splinter.”

“Did you see any sign whatsoever, either in the lean-to or anywhere else about the premises, either during that first quick search on finding the body or at any time subsequently, of freshly split firewood?”

“No, sir.”

“Your witness, Judge Webster.”

Andrew Webster (and this time, Johnny noted, the tip of his thorny old nose was white with determination): “Constable Hackett, did you examine defendant’s clothing on the afternoon of Saturday last, July fifth?”

“Me and Hube Hemus. It was when Mr. Sheare come down with some dry duds for the prisoner and we removed his wet ones.”

“Did you find any bloodstains on defendant’s clothing?”

“Well, no, though that’s what I was lookin’ for. But they were soakin’ wet and plastered with mud and sludge from the swamp. Any blood’d got on his clothes or hands had been washed out.”

“Ignoring the totally unwarranted inference, Constable,” snapped Andy Webster, “didn’t it occur to you as an officer of the law that there is such a thing as chemical analysis of clothing, which might definitely have established the presence — or absence — of bloodstains even on wet, muddy clothing?”

“Object!”

“Overruled,” said Judge Shinn gently.

“Never occurred to me,” Burney Hackett said in a sulky tone. “Anyway, we got no facil’ties for such things—”

“There is a modern scientific laboratory in Odham regularly used by nearby Cudbury County police departments for just such purposes, is there not, Constable Hackett?”

“This isn’t proper cross—” began Ferriss Adams automatically. Then he shook his head and shut up.

“Constable, what happened to the clothing you tore from the defendant’s body?”

“Elizabeth Sheare cleaned ’em—”

“In other words, it is now impossible to establish the presence or absence of bloodstains. Constable Hackett, did you attempt to bring out any fingerprints on the murder weapon?”

Burney Hackett’s underdeveloped jaw waggled. “Fingerprints... Heck no, Judge Webster. I don’t know nothin’ ’bout fingerprints. Anyway, the poker was too messed up—”

“You did not send the poker to a qualified police or other laboratory for fingerprint examination?”

“No...”

“Have you handled the poker since Saturday, Constable?”

“Well, I did, yes. So did Hube Hemus, Mr. Adams, Orville Pangman... I guess most everybody’s handled it since Saturday.” Hackett’s large ears were now a bright, pulsing red.

Ferriss Adams’s glance appealed to Judge Shinn. But the Judge merely sat judge-like.

“One thing more, Constable. For the record, where were you at two-thirteen o’clock Saturday afternoon?”

Johnny relaxed. He had asked Andrew Webster to establish the whereabouts of every witness at the time of the murder, on any pretext, and he had begun to think the old man had forgotten.

Hackett was startled. “Me? I’d drove over to Cudbury Saturday morning for a talk with Lyman Hinchley ’bout figgerin’ out the insurance plan for Aunt Fanny Adams’s paintin’s. I got the figgers from Lyman and started on back from Cudbury—”

“What time did you leave Hinchley’s insurance office?”

“About two o’clock. The rain was just startin’ to come down. Got back home at twenty minutes of three. Parked my car — I remember I was madder’n hops at my Jimmy, he’d left his trike in the middle of my garage and I had to get out, it’s only a one-car garage, and got soakin’ wet—”

“Never mind that, Constable. It took you forty minutes, then, to drive from Cudbury to Shinn Corners, leaving Cudbury at about two o’clock. At two-thirteen, then, you were somewhere between Cudbury and this village?”

“Well, sure. I’d say... coverin’ twenty-eight miles in forty minutes, goin’ a bit over forty miles an hour all the way... I’d saw at two-thirteen I was ’bout nine miles out of Cudbury. Say nineteen miles from Shinn Corners.”

“That’s all.”

The next witness Adams called was Samuel Sheare.

The little pastor rose slowly from the last seat in the first row of jurors — Johnny, directly behind him, could see his bony shoulders contract and his skinny neck telescope into itself. He made his way to the Windsor chair, where Burney Hackett was waiting with the Bible. The touch of its limp cover seemed to reassure him. He took the oath in a clear voice.

At the trestle table old Andy Webster put his hand up to his eyes, as if to shut out the horrid spectacle of a juror preparing to testify in a murder case. Usher Peague was watching incredulously.

“Mr. Sheare,” said Adams, after the minister had given his name and occupation, “you were present in Fanny Adams’s house on the morning of July fourth — the day before the murder — and you had a conversation with her at that time?”

“Yes.”

“Will you please tell the jury what Aunt Fanny Adams said to you on that occasion, and what you said to her.”

Mr. Sheare looked distressed. His hands clasped and unclasped. He addressed the hooked rug at his feet, telling how Mrs. Adams had taken him into her kitchen for a talk, how she had offered him twenty-five dollars to buy his wife a new summer dress—

“Just a moment, Mr. Sheare. Where did Aunt Fanny get the money she offered you?”

“Out of one of her spice jars on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet.” Mr. Sheare’s voice faltered.

“What kind of spice jar was it? Was it marked in any way?”

“Yes. The word Cinnamon was printed on it in kind of Old English gilt letters.”

“Is this the jar, Mr. Sheare?” Adams held it up.

“Yes.” Johnny had to strain to hear the response.

“Exhibit D, your honor, entered in evidence.”

Josef Kowalczyk had his hands flat on the table, staring at the jar, his gray skin a muddy grave color. And the jury looked at him without expression.

“Mr. Sheare, do you know how much money was left in this jar after Aunt Fanny gave you the twenty-five dollars?”

“Yes...”

“How much?” Adams had to repeat the question. “How much, Mr. Sheare?”

“A hundred and twenty-four dollars.”

A sound, very slight, rippled through the room. It raised the short hairs on Johnny’s neck.

“How do you know she had a hundred and twenty-four dollars left in this jar after she gave you the twenty-five dollars?”

“’Cause she told me the jar contained a hundred and forty-nine dollars in bills, besides some loose change.”

“And twenty-five from a hundred and forty-nine, by simple subtraction, left a hundred and twenty-four, is that correct, Mr. Sheare? That’s how you know?”

“Yes...”

“What did she do with the cinnamon jar after she gave you the money?”

“She put it back on the cabinet shelf.”

“In the kitchen?”

“Yes.”

“And this happened on Friday, the day before the murder?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Mr. Sheare. Your witness.”

Andy Webster waved.

“I call as my next witness,” said Ferriss Adams bashfully, “er... Judge Lewis Shinn.”

But while the presiding judge left his bench to come around and take the oath as a witness in the case he was trying, Johnny edged out of his seat and stole away.

He went into Aunt Fanny’s kitchen, looked up a number in the telephone book on the cabinet, and gave it to the operator. It was a Cudbury number.

A girl’s voice answered. “Lyman Hinchley’s office.”

“Mr. Hinchley, please. Tell him it’s John Shinn, Judge Shinn’s cousin. I met him at a Rotary lunch in Cudbury about ten days ago.”

The brassy tones of Cudbury’s ace insurance broker belled into Johnny’s ear almost at once. “’Lo there, Shinn! Enjoying your stay with the Judge?”

Then Hinchley hadn’t heard. “Real vacation, Mr. Hinchley,” Johnny said with genuine heartiness. “Fishing, lazing around... Oh, I’ll tell you why I’m calling. It’s going to sound silly, but I’ve been having an argument with Burney Hackett here — you know Burney, don’t you?”

“Sure do,” chuckled the insurance broker. “Real hick constabule. Harmless, though. Fancies himself as an insurance man.”

“Yes. Well, Burney tells me he was over to see you Saturday about some insurance advice and says he drove the twenty-eight miles back from your office to Shinn Corners in forty minutes by the clock. I said he couldn’t do it in that jalopy of his, but he swears he left your office at two o’clock Saturday. Did he, or is he pulling my leg?”

“I guess he’s got you, Shinn. At least he did leave here around two. I remember he hadn’t been out of my office two minutes when the rain started. And that was two o’clock on the nose.”

“Well, I’ll have to apologize to his heap! Thanks, Mr. Hinchley...”

And returned to his campchair in time to hear Judge Shinn finish the recital of their movements Saturday and to be called to the stand himself.

Johnny’s story corroborated the Judge’s in detail, including the meeting with Josef Kowalczyk in the rain about a mile and a quarter from the village.

“You say, Mr. Shinn,” said Ferriss Adams, “that you passed the defendant on the road at twenty-five minutes to three. How sure are you of the time?”

“Pretty sure. Judge Shinn had looked at his watch at two-thirty. My estimate is that about five minutes passed, and then we spotted Kowalczyk across the road going toward Cudbury.”

“What time did you and Judge Shinn arrive at the Judge’s house?”

“Just about three o’clock.”

“In other words, it took you and Judge Shinn twenty-five minutes to get from the spot where you met Kowalczyk to the Judge’s house?”

“Yes.”

“Did you walk steadily?”

“You mean without pausing?”

“Yes.”

“We paused three times,” said Johnny. “First, we stopped to stare after Kowalczyk when he passed us and before we resumed our hike. Second, Burney Hackett’s car passed us without seeing us and gave us a splashing, and that held us up for a short time. Third, we halted at the top of Holy Hill near Hosey Lemmon’s shack.”

“How long would you say, Mr. Shinn, those three pauses took altogether?”

“Maybe a minute.”

“Now the twenty-five minutes you gave us as the allover time between first sighting Kowalczyk and arriving at the Judge’s house comes out longer, does it not, than if you figured it between first sighting Kowalczyk and passing the Adams house on your way to the Judge’s?”

“If you mean how much time it took us to walk the last leg of the trip between the Adams house and the Shinn house, I should think no longer than two minutes.”

“Then with the one minute of delays en route and the two minutes after passing the Adams house, you’d say, Mr. Shinn, that the actual walking time between the place where you met Kowalczyk and the Adams house was twenty-five minus three, or twenty-two minutes?”

“Roughly,” agreed Johnny. “You’d need a stopwatch to be accurate.”

“You and the Judge walked fast?”

“Yes.”

“Was the defendant walking fast when you sighted him?”

“Yes.”

“As fast as you two, or faster, or not as fast?”

“I really couldn’t say,” Johnny shrugged. “Fast.”

“Is it a fair inference that he was walking at about the same pace as you and the Judge?”

“Object!” growled Andy Webster.

“Sustained,” said Judge Shinn.

“Do you agree, Mr. Shinn,” said Ferriss Adams, “that if it took you and the Judge twenty-two minutes’ walking time between the meeting place on the road and the Adams house, then it took Kowalczyk about the same time to get from the Adams house to the meeting place—”

“Object!”

“—and consequently that Kowalczyk must have left the Adams house at two-thirteen, or in other words just about the time of the murder?”

“Ob-jection! Your honor, I move that this entire line of testimony, both questions and answers, be stricken!”

“Oh, I think we’ll let it stand, Judge Webster,” murmured Judge Shinn.

Usher Peague rubbed his ears. Then he went back to his headlong scribbling.

Ferriss Adams brought out Kowalczyk’s “suspicious actions” on sighting the two men in the rain — “Yes, sir, he started to run” — and Andy Webster came back on cross-examination to establish that Johnny and the Judge had been toting guns, implying that any ignorant stranger encountering two armed men on a lonely road might have started to run, too... but in the main it was a cut-and-dried exchange, and Webster did not embroider the point.

Then Johnny resumed his place among the jury and Peague had more wonders to jot down in his notes... the prosecutor taking the stand as a witness while the judge took over the role of prosecutor!

Ferriss Adams told of his arrival at the Adams house at three-thirty Saturday afternoon, how a remark about a tramp had recalled to his mind the man he had seen walking along the road towards Cudbury in the rain a few minutes before, how Burney Hackett had deputized him and the two Shinns to go after the tramp; and of the events that followed, including defendant’s “malicious act” in pushing his, Adams’s, car into the bog in the swamp to delay pursuit — an episode which, to judge from Adams’s bitter tone, still rankled.

On cross-examination Andrew Webster said: “Mr. Adams, you have testified that your visit to Fanny Adams Saturday afternoon was occasioned by an urgent request from her that you come to see her. Will you tell us the circumstances?”

“What’s the relevance of the question?” asked the acting prosecutor, stepping out of his role momentarily to become the judge again.

“Anything the victim did or said just prior to her murder, your honor, especially cast in terms of urgency,” said Andy Webster, “may throw light on the crime. If, for example, Mrs. Adams was in some sort of trouble with a neighbor and wished to discuss it with her grandnephew, who is a lawyer, surely that fact would be relevant and possibly important.”

“Answer the question, Mr. Adams.”

“I can’t,” said Ferriss Adams. “I don’t know what she wanted. She didn’t say, and by the time I got to the house she was dead.” He related that he had locked his Cudbury office in the Professional Building on Washington Street Saturday about five minutes to one, his secretary being on vacation, and had gone out to lunch and to see some people. On his return about two-thirty he had found a note under his door. The note was from Emily Berry — Mrs. Peter Berry, Juror Number Nine — saying that she was at Dr. Everett Kaplan’s dental office with the children and that he was to phone her there, she had a message for him from his Aunt Fanny. He had called Emily Berry immediately from his office phone and found her still at Dr. Kaplan’s office.

“Mrs. Berry told me my aunt had been trying to reach me all morning but my phone was busy — that was true, I was on the phone all Saturday morning on a real estate matter involving a lawsuit. So Aunt Fanny’d asked her to stop by my office and give me a message. She’d got to my office about one o’clock, a few minutes after I left for lunch, and not finding me in she slipped a note under my door. Mrs. Berry said the message was that I was to go see Aunt Fanny in Shinn Corners right away.”

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!”

“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.

“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’—”

“Between five minutes to two,” said Ferriss Adams, “and, say, half-past two, how many customers came into the store, Mr. Berry? How many times did the bell jingle?”

Berry thought, his facial curves shifting and overlapping wonderfully. “Six!”

“Six customers?”

“Six jingles. Three comin’ in, three goin’ out. The same three.”

“Oh, I see. Who was the first, the one who came in at five minutes of two?”

“Hosey Lemmon. I was kind of surprised, ’cause I’d thought old man Lemmon was hired out over at the Scotts’, helpin’ Drakeley. But he said he’d just up and quit and he wanted to buy some beans and flour and such, he was headed back up Holy Hill to his shack.” Berry shook his massive head. “Can’t never tell about Hosey.”

Mathilda Scott, in seat number four of the front row, nodded unconsciously, and Johnny heard her sigh.

“And the second customer?”

“Prue Plummer, just about two minutes after Hosey’d come in.”

In the jury box in seat number ten, Prue Plummer smiled violently. She nudged the occupant of seat number nine, Emily Berry, who replied with a withering look and a haughty shoulder.

“Two minutes? You mean Miss Plummer arrived at one fifty-seven? Three minutes of two?”

“Must have been. Hadn’t yet started to rain. I remember she was in the store a couple minutes before the rain started.”

“How long were Hosey Lemmon and Miss Plummer in your store?”

“A spell. They were still there when Hube Hemus came in for some quotations on a new harrow, and for some time after that.”

“Can you remember what time Mr. Hemus came in?”

“Few minutes after Prue. I’d say about two-four, two-five. Rain was comin’ down hard. He had to run from his car, even though he’d parked it right in front of the store.”

“What happened then?”

“I’d told Hosey Lemmon to wait, and Prue was pokin’ through the frozen foods case while Hube and I went through some catalogues—”

“And Calvin Waters was still there?”

“Yep. The five of us.”

“How long, Mr. Berry,” asked Adams casually — and Judge Shinn, Webster, Peague and Johnny all leaned forward, “how long were the five of you together in the store?”

“Till two-nineteen. Hube was the first to leave, and that’s when he left.”

“How can you recall the time so exactly, Mr. Berry?”

“’Cause just before Hube left he took out his watch and set it by my store clock. My clock said two-nineteen. Prue Plummer said her watch made it only two-eighteen, but I told her my clock ain’t missed a minute in ten years — best on the market. She was wrong, and she knew it.” (Prue Plummer’s lips retracted, bringing her nose down in a power dive.) “Then Hube run out to his car and drove off, I waited on Mis’ Plummer and she left, must have been a few minutes later, and then I finished up with old man Lemmon. Fact is,” said Peter Berry, “I wasn’t too sure Hosey had any money. Naturally I don’t ever charge any of his purchases... Well, he’d been paid off in cash at the Scotts’. Must say I was surprised, seem’ that...” Peter Berry stopped, glancing quickly at Judge Shinn. “I mean,” said Berry with a cough, “Hosey left a few minutes after Mis’ Plummer, and then Calvin and me went back to the garage.”

Ferriss Adams turned the witness over to Andrew Webster.

“Mr. Berry,” said the old jurist, “you say that between a few minutes past two o’clock Saturday and two-nineteen you and the other people you mentioned were in the store together. Did you happen to notice, or did one of your customers happen to mention noticing, anyone passing on Shinn Road during that period? Going either toward the Adams house, or away from it?”

“No, sir.”

“You didn’t see the defendant at all?”

“Nope. Couldn’t have, anyways. Can’t see the Adams house from my store ’less you stand in the doorway or climb up on the merchandise in my display window on the Shinn Road side.”

“Thank you, that’s all.”

Ferriss Adams called a conference with Andy Webster before Judge Shinn’s table. They discussed in low tones the advisability of calling Calvin Waters. Finally they decided against it; the time period would be covered by other witnesses, and to try to get anything coherent out of Laughing Waters, as the Judge said, would be just about as feasible as throttling Emily Berry.

“We’ve got his half-wittedness on the record, anyway,” whispered Judge Webster.

So Adams called as his next witness Prue Plummer.

Prue Plummer was a lawyer’s nightmare; or, in Peague’s version during the noon recess, a gypsy tartar. She had dressed in her artiest skirt-and-blouse combination. The skirt was felt, with felt abstractions appliquéd on it in screaming oranges, pinks, and greens; the blouse was a handpainted, offshoulder cotton at which the other women had been glancing disapprovingly all morning; and she had put on her dangliest earrings and bound her head in a purple silk scarf to complete the illusion.

She literally ran away with Ferriss Adams’s questions. As Adams said later, it would have taken Roy Rogers on a fast horse to catch her.

“Certainly I remember Saturday’s events, Mr. Adams. Every last, bloodcurdling detail! At one forty-five there was a knock on my back door and I opened it to find a dirty, filthy man standing there, with a dark foreign skin and eyes that burned holes through me, a murderer if I ever saw one — that monster there!”

“Miss Plummer—” began Ferriss Adams.

“Objection!” howled Andy Webster simultaneously.

“Sustained!” said Judge Shinn. “Miss Plummer, you will please stick to what happened. No opinions, please.” (But he did not order the answer struck.)

“Well, he did!” rasped Prue Plummer. “I don’t care, a fact’s a fact and that’s a fact. You can tell a great deal from a human face, at least I can, not that his face is human... Yes, Judge... I mean your honor... Yes, sir... Well, he had the colossal gall to beg for something to eat and you can bet I lost no time telling him what I thought of beggars and sending him packing! I’m not feeding any stray off the roads who looks like a killer in my house when I’m alone... But he does, your honor!... Yes, your honor.

“Anyway, I followed him to my gate and watched him walk up Shinn Road and cross the intersection diagonally to the horse trough and go past the church to Aunt Fanny Adams’s house. He kind of hesitated at her gate, then he sort of looked around — furtively—”

“Objection!” roared Judge Webster for the fifth time.

“—as if he wanted to be sure no one was seeing him, and he sneaked around the side of the house toward Aunt Fanny’s kitchen door—”

“What time would that have been, Miss Plummer?” asked Adams despairingly.

“Ten minutes of two. Then I went back into my house and began locking doors and windows—”

“Why did you do that?” asked Adams, in spite of himself.

“You don’t think I’d leave my house wide open with all my valuable antiques and things in it, while a murderer was loose in the village!”

“Please,” said Andrew Webster feebly.

“And anyway I had to go to the store. I needed something for my dinner.”

“You walked over, of course, Miss Plummer.”

“Walked over? Certainly I walked over! Don’t be ridiculous, Mr. Adams. I’m no cripple. Though if I’d known it was going to rain, I would have driven over, only I couldn’t have because my car’s at ’Lias Wurley’s garage in Cudbury being overhauled, as Peter Berry can tell you himself — he saw Mr. Wurley’s mechanic drive it away.” She sniffed at Peter Berry — repayment, no doubt, thought Johnny, for Berry’s slur at the unreliability of her timepiece. “I’m supposed to leave next week for a motor trip to Cape Cod. To visit some friends, famous artists—”

“Yes, Miss Plummer. What time was it when you entered the Berry store?”

“Peter Berry told you. It was just one fifty-seven—”

Adams finally caught up with her testimony about the episode of the Berry store, although he was a little out of breath by the time he brought it down. Her story corroborated Berry’s in every detail except the time Hubert Hemus had left the store — “It was two-eighteen. By my watch, anyway!”

The balance of Prue Plummer’s testimony concerning her overhearing of Burney Hackett’s phone call at three-fifteen to Judge Shinn — “I did not eavesdrop, as alleged. It was an innocent mistake, but of course when I heard Aunt Fanny had been murdered and remembered that foul tramp over there...” — and her very busy time afterward calling Burney Hackett and broadcasting the news to everyone she could think of. She had yelled out her back door to Orville Pangman, who was out at his barn with his son Eddie and young Joel Hackett; and she had dashed over to the Hacketts’ next door to shout into Selina Hackett’s ear; but the rest had been phone calls...

Andy Webster, mercifully, made no attempt to cross-examine.

Hubert Hemus’s testimony had to be mined out of him. He answered as if every word were a precious stone to be weighed to the last grain.

It soon became apparent that he was suspicious of the kind of questions Ferriss Adams was asking, and Adams wisely shifted his tactics and left the legal improprieties to Webster’s cross-examination.

He and his twin boys, Hemus said, had been plowing and harrowing a field all morning, preparing it for a late corn planting. The harrow had broken down shortly after lunch, and he had driven into the village to see Peter Berry about ordering a new one. On his return, he and the twins worked in the barn, the rain holding up the planting. They were in the barn when Rebecca Hemus came out screaming that Prue Plummer had just called to say Aunt Fanny Adams had been murdered. Hemus had run ahead, jumping into the car and driving back to the village; Tommy, Dave, their mother, their sister had followed in the only other available vehicle, the farm truck. The three Hemus men had then joined the posse...

Andy Webster said: “About your visit to Peter Berry’s store, Mr. Hemus. Who was there when you came in?”

“Peter, Calvin, Hosey Lemmon, Prue Plummer.”

“What time did you leave the store?”

“Peter said. Two-nineteen.”

“Between the time you went in and the time you came out, Mr. Hemus, did anyone in the store leave? Step out for a few minutes, maybe?”

“No.” Hube Hemus shifted squarely in the witness chair, challenging Judge Shinn. “Your honor, I want to ask a question.”

“As a witness, Mr. Hemus—” began the Judge.

“I’m askin’ as a juror. Juror’s got a right to ask questions, ain’t he?”

“All right, Hube,” said the Judge in a friendly way, but fast.

“What I want to know is, why’s everybody bein’ asked where they were round the time of the murder? Who’s on trial here, like Em Berry asked — this furrin tramp, or Shinn Corners?”

Talk fast, Mr. Moto, thought Johnny, grinning to himself. It had been too good to last, anyway. He wondered what the Judge was going to say, feeling a hearty gratitude that it was the Judge who had to say it.

Johnny thought the Judge, who had grown the merest bit ruddy about the ears, did a remarkable job of improvisation.

“Hube, how much do you know about trials?”

Hemus kept looking at him. “Not much.”

“Think I know anything about trials?”

“Expect you do, Judge.”

“What’s the purpose of a trial, Hube?”

“Prove a man guilty.”

“How is a man proved guilty in a court of law?”

“Through evidence and testimony.”

“Is all evidence the same, Hube?” Hemus frowned; as he frowned, his jaws began to grind. “No,” the Judge answered himself. “There are two kinds of evidence, direct and indirect. What evidence would prove most directly in this case that Josef Kowalczyk did in fact strike Fanny Adams on the head with that poker until she fell dead?”

Hemus thought that over. Finally he said, “Guess if somebody’d seen him do it.”

Judge Shinn beamed. “Exactly. Did you see him do it, Hube?”

“No. I was in Peter’s store...”

“How could the attorneys responsible for the proper conduct of this trial know that you were in Peter’s store at the time of the murder, Hube, and therefore didn’t see the defendant do it... unless they asked you?”

Bong! said Johnny to himself.

Hube Hemus’s jaws ground away furiously.

“How could they find out who did see him do it, if anybody did,” the Judge went on with terrible eloquence, “unless they asked everybody where they were?”

Hemus’s back drooped. “Didn’t think to see it that way, Judge. But,” he added quickly, “that’s not the only way to prove a man guilty—”

“’Course not, Hube,” said Judge Shinn indulgently. “Trial is a complicated business. All sorts of angles to it. This case may very well be decided solely on circumstantial evidence — most murder cases are. But I think you’d be the first to stand up and say, Hube, that everyone in Shinn Corners wants to do this right. So now if Judge Webster is through with his cross-examination, let’s get on with the trial, shall we?”

And Judge Webster was through. Judge Webster, in fact, was taken with a coughing fit that doubled his frail old carcass over.

“No more questions,” he spluttered, waving helplessly.

Although it was early, Judge Shinn recessed for lunch.

Court reconvened for the afternoon session with all participants under control, although through varying disciplines. The forces of law and order, who had come into the room in the well-being of danger bypassed and easy going ahead, soon glanced at one another doubtfully. The jury and the bailiff were too quiet, their never-loose mouths jammed shut.

The defendant sat down warily, watching like an animal. He had sensed the hardening at once. There was a smear of egg at one corner of his mouth, a clue to Elizabeth Sheare’s complicity.

Rebecca Hemus’s great buttocks squeezed between the rungs of the witness chair in long rolls, like sausages. She kept sucking at her teeth and moving her lower jaw from side to side in a bovine continuity. Her stare disconcerted Judge Shinn, and he kept glancing elsewhere.

That’s it, thought Johnny. They’ve talked over the Judge’s double talk and they’ve spotted it for what it was. He felt rather sorry for the Judge.

Rebecca’s testimony confirmed her husband’s. Hube and the boys had worked in the field all Saturday morning while she and Abbie were in the truck garden weeding and thinning. When the harrow broke down and Hube left for Peter Berry’s, the twins came over and cultivated in the rows till the rain began. They all ran back to the house and the boys fixed a separator that needed doing. When Hube got back he and the twins went out to the barn. Then about twenty or twenty-five minutes past three Prue Plummer phoned the terrible news, Hube got into the car, she and Abbie and the boys got into the truck...

“In other words, Mrs. Hemus,” said Adams, “at two-thirteen Saturday afternoon you, your daughter, and Tommy and Dave were in your house within sight of one another?”

“We were,” said Rebecca Hemus accusingly.

Andrew Webster waived cross-examination, and Mrs. Hemus was excused.

“I recall to the stand,” said Adams, “Reverend Samuel Sheare.”

The minister was poorly today. His movements were slow and his bloodshot eyes suggested that there had been little rest for the spirit. He took his seat with the stiffness of a man who has been too long on his knees.

Adams came to the point at once: “Mr. Sheare, where exactly were you at two-thirteen Saturday afternoon?”

“I was in the parsonage.”

“Alone?”

“Mrs. Sheare was with me.”

“In the same room, Mr. Sheare?”

“Yes. I was workin’ on my sermon for Sunday. I began directly after lunch, which was at noon, and I was still hard at it when the fire siren went off. Mrs. Sheare and I were never out of sight of each other.”

Adams was embarrassed. “Of course, Mr. Sheare. Er... you didn’t happen to see anyone pass the north corner — let’s say from a window of the parsonage overlooking Shinn Road — between a quarter to two and a quarter after?”

“We were in my study, Mr. Adams. My study is at the opposite side of the parsonage, facin’ the cemetery.”

“Judge Webster?”

“No questions.”

“You may stand down, Mr. Sheare,” said Judge Shinn.

But Mr. Sheare sat there. He was looking at Josef Kowalczyk, and Josef Kowalczyk was looking back at him with the unclouded trust of a mortally injured dog.

“Mr. Sheare?” said the Judge again.

The minister started. “Pa’don. I know this is probably out of order, Judge Shinn, but may I take this opportunity to make a request of the court?”

“Yes?”

“When I took Josef the lunch tray my wife prepared for him today, he asked me to do somethin’ for him. I should very much like to do it. But I realize that under the circumstances it’s necessary to get permission.”

Andrew Webster shot a glance at the prisoner. But the man had eyes only for Samuel Sheare.

“What is it the defendant wants, Mr. Sheare?”

“His faith forbids him to accept spiritual consolation from a clergyman not of his church. He would like to see a priest. I ask permission to call Father Girard of the Church of the Holy Ascension in Cudbury.”

Judge Shinn was silent.

“He’s very much in need, Judge,” said Mr. Sheare urgently. “We must realize that he’s goin’ through tremendous anxiety not only because of his predicament but also ’cause he’s bein’ held in a Protestant church. Surely—”

“Mr. Sheare.” The Judge leaned forward in a sort of colic. “This is a request which shouldn’t even have to be made. But you know the peculiar... restrictions of our circumstances here. To bring in an outsider now, even a man of the cloth, might give rise to complications we simply couldn’t cope with. I’m dreadfully sorry. In a few days, yes. But not now, Mr. Sheare. Do you think you can make the defendant understand?”

“I doubt it.”

Samuel Sheare gathered himself and went back to his chair, where he folded his hands and closed his eyes.

“Elizabeth Sheare,” said Ferriss Adams.

Then followed the spectacle of the court stenographer exchanging her notebook for the witness chair, and the ancient defense attorney, who claimed to have perfected a shorthand system of his own almost two generations before, temporarily taking over her duties.

Her tenure was short. The stout wife of the pastor testified in a soft and troubled voice, seeking the eyes of her husband frequently — they opened as soon as she took the stand — and answering without hesitation.

Yes, she had joined her husband in his study immediately after doing the lunch dishes Saturday. No, she had not helped him with his sermon; Mr. Sheare always prepared his sermons unaided. She had planned to go to Cudbury with Emily Berry and the Berry children to do some shopping—

“Oh, you don’t have a car, Mrs. Sheare?”

She flushed. “Well, we don’t really need one, Mr. Adams. This is a very small parish, and when Mr. Sheare goes parish-calling he walks...”

But she had changed her mind about going to Cudbury; Johnny gathered that some stern Congregational discipline had had to be exercised. The school year had ended on Friday, June the twenty-seventh, and in the week before Independence Day she had been busy cleaning up the schoolroom, taking inventory of school property, putting textbooks and supplies away, filing students’ records, and the like; on Thursday, the day before the holiday, she had finished and locked the school for the summer. But she had one further duty to perform, and it was this that had dissuaded her from going into Cudbury with Emily Berry on Saturday. She spent the afternoon at work beside her husband preparing her annual report to the school board, summarizing the year just ended, attendance records, a financial statement, the probable enrollment for the fall term, and so on. Yes, they had worked steadily without leaving the house until the alarm sent them rushing outdoors to learn of Aunt Fanny Adams’s shocking death.

Andrew Webster had only one question: “Mrs. Sheare, when you got home Friday from Mrs. Adams’s get-together, or perhaps after the Fourth of July exercises on the green, did your husband give you any money?”

“Yes,” answered Elizabeth Sheare in a low voice, “twenty-five dollars, two tens and a five, with which he told me to buy a dress. That’s why I wanted to go to Cudbury Saturday with Emily Berry. Mr. Sheare didn’t say where he’d got the money, but I knew. The bills smelled of cinnamon.”

Orville Pangman raised his enormous hand, took the oath, and lowered his body into the witness chair.

At one-thirty Saturday afternoon, he testified, he and his son Eddie and Joel Hackett, who was “helpin’ out,” began work on the roof of his barn, which needed reshingling. At one forty-five they had noticed the tramp — Orville Pangman jerked his head toward Kowalczyk — at Prue Plummer’s back door; they had remarked about him. They had seen Prue turn the tramp away, the tramp leave, and Prue follow him to the road and stare after him for a few minutes before going indoors again.

They had worked right through until about half-past three, Eddie ripping up the old shingles on the roof, Joel handing up the new ones from the farm truck, and he, Orville, nailing them into place. Yes, right through the rain and all. With half the rotten shingles ripped off the roof and the rain looking as if it were going to keep up indefinitely, they had to keep going or flood the barn. “We grabbed some slickers hangin’ in the barn and kept goin’. Got wet some, but we finished the job.” Pangman had just nailed the last shingle into place when Prue Plummer came running to her back door screaming the news that Aunt Fanny had been murdered. The three of them had immediately jumped into the truck — “Car was in the garage and I didn’t want to waste time backin’ her out” — and driven over to the Adams house to join the posse. No, Millie wasn’t home at two-thirteen. She’d gone over to the Judge’s and got back about half-past two.

Millie Pangman’s honest face was set in iron curves as she took the oath. She sat down and made two fists menacingly, glaring at Kowalczyk through her goldrimmed eyeglasses.

She certainly did know where she’d been at two-thirteen on Saturday. Fool question, seeing that her husband Orville had just said where she’d been, but if they wanted her to say it, too, she’d just as soon. She was over in Judge Shinn’s kitchen, that’s where she was. She’d gone over there just before the rain started with a meat pie she’d got ready at home, and she put it in the oven on low heat and prepared some vegetables for the Judge’s supper, and then she went back home, figuring to drop in a few times during the afternoon to keep an eye on the meat pie. Only with what happened, it burned and the Judge and Mr. Shinn had to eat out of cans Saturday night. Yes, she left the Judge’s house about two-thirty. No, she wasn’t alone. She had Deborah in tow, to keep the child out of mischief. Debbie got into more mischief than any six-year-old in Cudbury County; she’d be mighty glad when fall rolled around and the child started school...

Andy Webster asked Millie Pangman a question that puzzled her: “Mrs. Pangman, when did you last hear from your son Merritt?”

“From Merritt? Well, I declare... Just Monday mornin’. Yesterday. Got an airmail letter from Japan. Merritt’s on some kind of special Navy duty there. What on earth—”

Mathilda Scott had dressed with care for the great event in what must once have been an expensive dress and a hat that had been in fashion during the war. Her beautiful eyes did not look up during her testimony. Her ravaged face with its dark hollows was apprehensive; she kept twisting her work-crippled hands. It was as if she were concealing not only a sorrow but a shame.

It was just another proof of the rottennesss of fate, Johnny reflected, that her neighbor in the jury box was Peter Berry.

At two-thirteen on Saturday, she said, she had been in the bedroom of her husband and father-in-law — because of the work involved in caring for two invalids, she had found it more convenient to keep them in the same room. She was sure of the time because she had had to give Earl his medicine at two o’clock — he took it every four hours during the day, and she was always careful to give it to him on the dot. And from that time until Prue Plummer called about twenty-five minutes or so after three, she remained in the bedroom... she, her husband, her father-in-law, and her daughter Judy. Earl was kind of jumpy, and Judy was reading to him, a Western magazine, he loved cowboy stories, even old Seth Scott seemed to enjoy them, though she doubted if he really understood... She? She was cleaning the room.

“There’s a mess of cleaning up has to be done around two helpless men,” Mathilda Scott murmured. “My father-in-law especially.”

“When you heard the news from Prue Plummer, Mrs. Scott, you went immediately to the Adams house?”

“Well, I didn’t want to, I mean I didn’t want to leave my husband, but Earl said Judy could take care of them — as she’s doing now — and I was to drive right over with Drakeley and find out what had happened. So Drakeley and I jumped into the jeep — he’d put the car into the garage out of the rain, the jeep was standing out front all day and had got wet anyway, and we don’t have a truck any more — anyway, we came on over.”

“Was Drakeley working around the place all that time you and the rest of your family were in the house, Mrs. Scott?”

“Well... not all the time.”

“Oh, Drakeley wasn’t home for a while?” asked Ferriss Adams.

“No.” The twisting hands twisted faster.

“Where’d your son been, Mrs. Scott?”

“He... he’d had to go somewhere for his father.”

“I see. What time did Drakeley leave the house?”

“Well, he worked all morning... He left about half-past one.”

“In the family car?”

“Yes.”

“What time did he get back?”

“About a quarter of three. Talked to his father some, changed his clothes, then went on out back to work. I called him in when I heard the news about Aunt Fanny.”

“Where did Drakeley have to go, Mrs. Scott?”

Mathilda Scott looked stricken, and Johnny sat forward. Was this the break?

But guilt has many faces. There was nothing in Mathilda Scott’s story of her son’s actions Saturday that to the insensitive called for twisting hands and a public agony. It was a familiar story, Johnny felt sure, to everyone there with the possible exception of the Berrys. Drakeley had simply gone over to Comfort to try to borrow money from Henry Worthington, president of the Comfort bank. The bank being closed on Saturdays, Drakeley had made a two o’clock appointment to see Worthington at his Comfort home. The boy had dressed in his best clothes and driven off at one-thirty. He had come back at a quarter to three, empty-handed. That was all. But it was apparently enough to make Mathilda Scott act like a criminal.

Judge Shinn adjourned court until Wednesday morning.

“I don’t know what there is about this thing that interests me,” Johnny said that night in the Judge’s study, “unless it’s the puzzle in it. Like one of those jigsaws. You have to keep looking for the missing pieces.”

“You’ll find ’em all,” predicted Ferriss Adams comfortably. “And when you do, you’ll have the picture on the cover — our Polish friend.”

Andy Webster sucked on his cigar and glared at Adams. “I hear enough of you during the day, Adams,” he said querulously. “Shut up and let the boy speak.”

Adams grinned.

“Both of you shut up,” snapped Judge Shinn. “How do we stand as of close of business tonight, Johnny?”

“Well, statistically speaking, we’re moving along,” said Johnny. “Nine people testified today. But they add up to a lot more.

“At the opening of court this morning we had twenty-eight people in Shinn Corners to account for.

“At two-thirteen Saturday Peter Berry, Prue Plummer, Hube Hemus, Hosey Lemmon, and Calvin Waters were all in Berry’s store. That’s five eliminated. Five from twenty-eight leaves twenty-three.

“Rebecca Hemus: She, her daughter, and the troglodyte twins were all in the Hemus house at two-thirteen. I’ve questioned Tommy and Dave separately this evening, even took a whack at Abbie, who made eyes at me. They alibi one another. Four more out. Four from twenty-three leaves nineteen.

“Nineteen to go, and we have the Sheares in the parsonage study. They alibi each other. Leaving seventeen.

“Orville Pangman’s testimony: He, his son Eddie, and young Joel Hackett were fixing the Pangmans’ barn roof at the crucial moment. Eddie and Joel agree — I’ve talked to them, too. Three more out, leaving fourteen.

“Millie Pangman: She and little Debbie were in this house preparing to burn a meat pie—”

“Hold it,” said Usher Peague. “Unconfirmed.”

“Confirmed,” said Johnny.

“Now see here! I’ll buy most anything in this fairy tale, but I draw the line at time corroboration by a six-year-old, who wouldn’t know two-thirteen P.M. Saturday the fifth from the date the first flying saucer was sighted.”

Johnny smiled. “I was lucky. Elizabeth Sheare tells me she was working on her school board report at the one study window in the parsonage that overlooks Four Corners Road. From that window, she says, she had a clear view of the west corner of the intersection and of this house. She says she saw Millie and Deborah arrive, and she saw them leave, at about the times Mrs. Pangman testified to. And she says she’s sure that if Millie Pangman had left the house at any time during that period, she’d have noticed. So Millie gets her alibi sans benefit of little Missie Deborah. Two from fourteen leaves twelve.

“Mathilda Scott: She, her husband Earl, her father-in-law Seth Scott, Judy — all in the same room in the Scott house at two-thirteen Saturday. Confirmation through Judy, a very intelligent young lady. Four from twelve leaves eight.”

Judge Shinn was drumming on his desk. The sound made him stop and reach for his brandy.

“Go on,” he growled.

“Drakeley Scott: Left at one-thirty to see a hardhearted Yankee banker about a farm loan. I have called said hardhearted banker and, regardless of the degree of his cardiac petrifaction, he’s done young Drakeley a good turn. Mr. Henry Worthington states that a two-thirteen P.M. Saturday Drakeley Scott was seated opposite him in the Worthington library being told that his father owed the Comfort bank enough money already, and to go peddle his dairy prospects elsewhere.

“Leaving seven.

“And still we’re not finished. I left out Merritt Pangman. His mother’s testimony about the airmail letter arriving from Japan yesterday morning pretty well covers Seaman Pangman, notwithstanding the clever theories to the contrary that could be worked up by old mystery story hands.

“Leaving, as of this moment, six.”

There was silence for some time.

“Well,” said Ferriss Adams at last, “tomorrow morning ought to see this nonsense cleaned up.”

Nobody replied.

Wednesday began with a bang. They heard the shot at the breakfast table and it brought them up like one man in a rush for the door.

A dusty convertible was hauled up at the intersection. The Hemus twins flanked it; smoke still drifted from Tommy Hemus’s gun. A pale elegant man in a pale elegant suit of gabardine and a pearl gray Homburg sat behind the wheel, sputtering.

As they ran into the road, Burney Hackett came streaking from his house on the south corner. They joined forces at the car.

“What’s ailing these thugs?” cried the stranger. His voice was fussily cultivated, falsetto with outrage. “These armed hoodlums jumped in front of my car and had the effrontery to order me to go back where I came from! When I refused, they fired a shot in the air and informed me in the most callous way imaginable that the next shot would be right at me!”

“You want to learn not to argue with a gun, mister,” said Tommy Hemus, “you’ll live longer. We wouldn’t ’a’ shot him, Judge.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” said Judge Shinn.

“Maybe put a hole through his beautiful hat,” said Dave Hemus. “I bet that lid cost more’n ten bucks.”

“Nearer thirty-five,” murmured Usher Peague.

“I told you boys not to mess with people passin’ through!” scolded Burney Hackett. “Now, didn’t I?”

“Sure you did, Burney,” drawled Tommy Hemus. “But this character ain’t passin’ through. He’s bound for Aunt Fanny’s house.”

“What is this?” shrieked the elegant man. “Isn’t this a public thoroughfare? I wasn’t speeding, was I, breaking any of your piddling hick laws? Will someone please explain!”

“Calm down, sir,” said the Judge. “May I ask who you are and why you want to visit Fanny Adams?”

“Ask anything you ruddy well please, I don’t have to answer you. Damned if I will!”

“Of course, you don’t have to answer, sir. But it would simplify matters if you did.”

“The name will mean nothing to you, I’m sure,” the man said shortly. “I’m Roger Casavant—”

“The art critic?” said Johnny.

“Well! There’s a fellow with at least a primeval culture—”

“Holy smoke,” said Ferriss Adams. “I’m responsible for this, Judge. Mr. Casavant phoned last night. I meant to tell you about it this morning. He asked for Aunt Fanny. Naturally—”

“Naturally,” said the Judge. “Mr. Casavant, you have an apology coming. Been driving all night?”

“Most of it!”

“Then perhaps you’ll join us in a bite of breakfast. No, leave the car here. The boys,” and Judge Shinn glanced at the twins, “will take very good care of it, you may be sure. It’s all right, Burney...”

It turned out that Roger Casavant had telephoned the night before to ask Fanny Adams if he might not drive up to see her.

“I suppose you might call me,” the art critic said, a little mollified by Millie Pangman’s ham and eggs, “the world’s leading authority on the painter Fanny Adams. I recognized her genius long before the others and I flatter myself that I’ve had a little something to do with the burgeoning of her career. A great artist, gentlemen! One of the greatest of the modern primitives. As a matter of fact, I’m her biographer. I conceived the idea over a year ago of doing her life and a definitive critique of her place in modern art, and she’s been gracious enough to give her consent and cooperation. She made only one condition about my book, that she have final say as to its factual content. I phoned last night to tell her that the first draft of the manuscript was finished. I meant to ask her permission to bring it up so that we could discuss any changes she wanted. Instead,” and Casavant glared at Ferriss Adams, “some furtive-sounding pinhead refused to call her to the phone and gave me such a slimy line of jabberwocky that I became seriously concerned. After all, I said to myself, she’s a very old lady and she does live alone. I was so alarmed I decided to drive right up... only to find my worst fears realized!”

“I’m afraid they’re even worse than that, Mr. Casavant,” said Judge Shinn. “Fanny Adams was murdered last Saturday afternoon.”

It took them some time to restore Roger Casavant’s aplomb. He wept real tears and wrung his beautiful hands as he delivered tragic periods to her memory.

“Saturday afternoon, you say? What an irony! Exactly when?... No, that’s too much. Lay another crime at the feet of television! I’d fully intended to come up here Friday evening for the weekend. But last Wednesday I was asked to join a Saturday round table TV program emanating from Chicago — on a discussion of modern art — so I flew out there instead on Friday evening. And there I was, in a wretchedly humid Chicago studio on Saturday afternoon between one and one-thirty, breaking lances against the impenetrable density of two so-called university professors, when but for that stupid waste of time I might have been here saving the life of Fanny Adams!”

Casavant seemed barely able to assimilate the vigilante situation in the village. He kept saying dazedly that he hadn’t seen a word of it in the papers.

“That magnificent, that God-given talent,” he kept repeating. “A trial, you say? Then you’ve run the animal to earth. Good, good! Why didn’t the newspapers—”

Far from bridling at the warning that he might not be permitted to leave Shinn Corners for a day or two, Casavant tilted his delicate chin and said that a legion of ruffians could not drive him from the village now. There was so much to do. He had to catch up on Fanny Adams’s recent paintings; this was his first visit since the previous August. He must see the one they said she was working on when she died — the last, the very last painting from that inspired brush... In the end, to be rid of him, Judge Shinn asked Ferriss Adams to take Casavant over to the Adams house and turn him loose among the paintings in the cabinets.

“Will it take you long, Mr. Casavant?”

“Oh, days and days. I’ll be making copious notes—”

“Well,” the Judge sighed, “as long as you stay out from underfoot...”

The first witness Wednesday morning was Selina Hackett, the constable’s mother. (“Long as we’re engaged in a mathematics problem,” said the Judge, “we may as well cancel out old Selina, too!”)

Each question had to be shouted in the old woman’s ear, and half the time her responses made no sense. But finally they got out of her a reasonable picture of her Saturday. Burney had left the Haclcett house, she said, well before noon to drive to Cudbury. She had given her grandchildren their lunch at about a quarter past twelve — Joel had to run over from the Pangmans’ and run right back — and after lunch she had made Cynthy and Jimmy go out with her to the small vegetable garden Burney had put in behind the garage to hoe and weed the carrots and onions and lettuce and beans. The rain at two o’clock had driven them back indoors, and there they had remained, through her son’s return from Cudbury and after, until Prue Plummer came running over to tell her about Aunt Fanny’s murder.

“Fine thing!” shouted Selina Hackett bitterly. “Fine thing when a body’s own child can’t tell his mother first, but I have to hear it from a neighbor!”

She was still glaring at her constabulary son when Ferriss Adams helped her out of the witness chair.

Judge Shinn called a short recess while Constable Hackett took his mother across the road to Shinn Free School, where the children were segregated, and brought back Sarah Isbel.

Merton Isbel got half out of his campchair when his daughter came in. But Orville Pangman seized the old man’s arm, Hube Hemus leaned over, both said something insistent to him, and he sank back, mumbling.

The Isbel woman spoke in whispers while the jury looked at the paintings on the walls, at the ceiling, at the hands in their laps.

Nobody looked at Merton Isbel.

Sarah had been in her workroom at the Isbel farm with her child Saturday from lunch time on, she said, sewing and fitting a dress; neither of them had set foot out of the house. The workroom was at the back of the house; it had been the smokeroom of the original farmhouse; her mother — this was almost inaudible — her mother had changed it over. Until the rain began her father was visible to her and Mary-Ann through the window. He was plowing behind Smoky, the old gray. The rain had brought him in; he had stabled Smoky. He had his smithy in a corner of the horse barn and she had heard the clang of his hammer on the anvil on and off until Prue Plummer phoned. When the news came, her father hitched Smoky and Ralph to the farm wagon — they had no car — and they drove into the village at a gallop.

When Andrew Webster signified that he had no questions, Sarah Isbel fled.

Ferriss Adams called Merton Isbel to the stand.

The old farmer began quietly enough. When the rain drove him into the barn, he had taken the opportunity to reshoe the two horses. No, he had not left the barn... He dropped to a mutter. The Swedish iron that he used to use for the nails... Johnny could not make out whether the Swedish horseshoe nails were no longer available or Isbel could no longer afford them... The lined face, full of pits, a face of weathered granite, came alive in the most curious way. Muscles and nerves began to move, so that the stone seemed turning to a lava, heating more and more from below, until the whole rocky structure was in motion.

And then, with a roar, Mert Isbel erupted.

“Whoreson! Seducer! Antichrist!”

He was on his feet in a crouch, left arm dangling, right arm leveled, chin and nose thrust forward in total accusation.

He was addressing Josef Kowalczyk.

Kowalczyk pressed back in his chair like a man flattening before a hurricane. Andrew Webster’s bony little bottom lifted itself clear of his seat as he grasped the edge of the pine table.

“Merton,” said Judge Shinn in a shocked voice.

“Mr. Isbel—” began Adams.

“Mert!” Burney Hackett reached.

But Merton Isbel roared again, and as he roared the people held their breath. For this was not the outburst of a sane man heated to anger; it was the explosion of sanity itself. Mert Isbel was hallucinated. For the moment he thought Josef Kowalczyk was the traveling man who had destroyed his daughter Sarah a decade before. And he damned the destroyer and praised God for delivering him into his hands.

“Robber — despoiler of virgins — father of bastards — furrin scum!”

Before their immobilized eyes the old farmer lunged across the pine table and pulled the stupefied prisoner from the chair, his powerful hands about the man’s throat.

“Ten years I’ve waited — ten years — ten years...”

Kowalczyk’s skin turned from gray to gray-violet. His eyes popped. He made strangling noises...

It took six men to drag Mert Isbel off the prisoner. They held him down on Fanny Adams’s trestle table, pinning his arms, hanging onto his thrashing legs. Gradually his struggles subsided, the madness went out of his eyes. They got him to his feet and took him upstairs to one of the bedrooms.

Judge Shinn surveyed the wreckage wildly.

“We’ll recess, we’ll recess,” he kept saying. “Will you people please help clean up this mess!”

Lunch was solitary. Each man chewed away at Millie Pangman’s sandwich tastelessly.

It was only when Ferriss Adams rose to return to the Adams house that Judge Shinn remarked, “Better polish it off, Ferriss. We’re going nowhere with extreme rapidity. Were you intending to rest?”

Adams said, “I was, but Casavant said something this morning when I took him over to Aunt Fanny’s that I think ought to come out.”

“That earbender?” The Judge frowned. “What can he possibly contribute?”

“It’s about the painting on the easel.”

“Oh?” Andy Webster looked up, interested. “What about the painting on the easel?”

“Never mind,” said the Judge. “All right, Ferriss, put Casavant on and wind up. Does it matter what he has to say, Andy? Or what you have to say? What have you to say, by the way? You’ll have to make some gesture at a defense.”

“We have no defense,” grunted the old man. “Truth is our defense, only nobody’ll believe it. I can only put Kowalczyk on the stand and let it go at that.”

“You may not be so sure Kowalczyk’s telling the truth, Judge Webster,” said Adams slyly, “when you hear what Casavant says.”

“Oh?” said old Andy again.

Adams left, whistling.

Usher Peague glanced curiously at Johnny. “Judge Shinn’s been telling me some fabulous stories about you. What are you doing, son, preparing to serve us a hasenpfeffer from that rabbit you’ve got up your sleeve?”

“No rabbits,” said Johnny. “Or anything else up my sleeve. You heard the testimony this morning. Old Selina and the Hackett kids, the three Isbels — that’s six more whose alibis eliminate them, and since those were the only six left to eliminate...”

“Zero,” said Peague thoughtfully.

“Yep,” said Johnny. “By the trickiest kind of luck everybody in town has an alibi. Everybody, that is, but one. And that’s the one who was tagged for it from the start.”

“Well,” said Andy Webster, slamming down his napkin, “that’s that!”

Judge Shinn was massaging his head.

“There’s always,” said the Cudbury editor brightly, “the man from Mars.”

“Oh, sure,” said Johnny. “If Kowalczyk didn’t kill her, someone else did. And since everybody’s whereabouts for the time of the murder is confirmed as having been elsewhere, that provisional somebody is an unknown. The only thing is, I’ve queried and requeried everyone in sight, with special attention to the kids, and nobody saw the slightest sign of one. There just wasn’t any stranger in Shinn Corners Saturday but Josef Kowalczyk.” Johnny shrugged. “Therefore Kowalczyk it’s got to be. It’s got to be Kowalczyk if only because — always excepting the man from Mars — there’s just no one else it could have been.”

The Judge looked at his watch. “Andy,” he said, “why do you believe Kowalczyk’s story?”

The old lawyer stirred. “You, of all people, Lewis!” he exclaimed. “How can you ask me a question like that? As a matter of fact, don’t you believe him? You know you do.”

“Well,” said the Judge uneasily.

“I’ve even,” murmured Johnny, “given myself a hayride in a daydream. You know — you start thinking things. Especially when you have my type of mind...”

“What things?” demanded the Judge.

“Well, I see some three dozen people in this daymare of mine, last inhabitants of a decrepit community called Shinn Corners, getting together in a secret hate session and conspiring to alibi one another so that the furriner’s guilt will be unassailable. Fact! That’s what I’ve been thinking. Why? Don’t ask me why. I suppose when you get right down to it, I don’t believe Kowalczyk’s guilty, either. Or, to put it more correctly, I don’t want Kowalczyk to be guilty. I still have enough romanticism left to get a smug bang out of seeing right triumph and evil get kicked in the prat. That’s my trouble, really... A conspiracy of thirty-five people, not excluding tender kiddies! Oh, and Pastor Sheare as well. Of such fanciful nastinesses is sentimentality made. All to avoid seeing my nose.

“Let’s face it, friends,” said Johnny, “we’re making passes at a non-existent animule. I’m sorry, Judge, but if that Gilbert and Sullivan jury you finagled me into were to take a vote right this minute, I’d have to vote our suffering Josef guilty.”

“Before you start with your witness, Mr. Adams,” said Judge Shinn, “Juror Number Three will please rise!”

“That’s you, Mert,” whispered Hube Hemus. “Get up.”

Merton Isbel got to his feet. He was haggard, but the wildness had gone out of his eyes and he looked like what he was, a sagging old man.

“Mert, you and I have known each other since we were boys hooking apples out of old man Urie’s orchard back beyond the Hollow,” said the Judge softly. “Have you ever known me to lie to you?”

Mert Isbel stared.

“So I tell you now: If you so much as lay one fingernail again on the defendant in this case, Mert, I will swear out a warrant for your arrest and personally see to it that you’re prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

The big old head slowly nodded.

“And what I have just told Merton Isbel,” said the Judge to the jury, “applies to every mother’s son and daughter in and out of this room who’s in any way involved in this case.” He rapped with Aunt Fanny’s darning egg so suddenly that Prue Plummer jumped. “Proceed with your witness, Mr. Adams!”

As Casavant was sworn in by Burney Hackett, and Ferriss Adams went to work eliciting from him his background and long association with Fanny Adams and her work, Johnny watched Josef Kowalczyk resentfully. The man both puzzled him and wrung his heart. He was either the world’s greatest actor or something was incredibly wrong. It grew increasingly hard to be cynical about him, and Johnny wanted above all to maintain his neutrality in a world of warring self-interests... Where before the Polish refugee had been frozen in terror, now he seemed frozen in peace. It was as if the clutch of Mert Isbel’s frenzied hands on his neck had been, in its dark taste of death, the fate he had dreaded from the beginning, the execution, the consummated dealing out of his punishment... as if he had been hanged, and the rope had snapped, and he was saved to face hanging all over again. No man could feel that fear twice. The knobby hands unconsciously — or consciously? — caressed the swollen throat. The welts, the pain, were — or were made to appear? — a reassurance.

Kowalczyk’s beard was quite heavy now. Put a gold ring on a stick over his head, Johnny thought, and get him into a nightgown, and he’d look like a medieval painting of Jesus Christ. Born to surfer for the redemption of mankind. But mankind was in this room, a bunch of ignorant idiots breathing hell’s fire down a scared killer’s neck. Unredeemed trash in a dirty old pawnshop. The lot of them.

Kowalczyk closed his eyes and his lips began moving soundlessly, as they did so often now. The sonofabitch was pretending to pray.

Johnny could have kicked him. Or himself.

He struggled to pay attention to Casavant.

“Now Mr. Casavant,” Ferriss Adams was saying, “I show you the painting on this easel, the same painting on the same easel found in Fanny Adams’s studio beside her body. During the course of your examination of the Adams canvases this morning, did you examine this canvas also?”

“I did.”

“Exhibit E, your honor.” When the painting had been marked, Adams continued: “Mr. Casavant, is this a genuine Fanny Adams painting?”

“Very much so,” smiled Roger Casavant. “If you’d like, I shall be happy to go into details of style, technique, color, brush-work—”

“That won’t be necessary, Mr. Casavant,” said Judge Shinn hastily. “There’s no question here of your qualifications. Go on, Mr. Adams.”

“Mr. Casavant. Will you tell the court and the jury whether this painting is finished or unfinished?”

“It is finished,” said the expert.

“There’s no question in your mind about that?”

“I have said, Mr. Adams, that the painting is finished. Naturally there is no question in my mind, or I should not have said it.”

“I see. Of course,” said Ferriss Adams humbly. “But our knowledge is not on the level of yours, Mr. Casavant—”

“Please note,” interrupted Casavant, “that when I say ‘the painting is finished’ I verbally italicize the word painting. By that I mean that the creative process of applying paint to canvas is over; I do not mean that no work remains to be done. There are mechanistic aspects to art: for example, when the canvas is dry, the artist usually applies a thin lacquer retouch varnish, which not only protects the surface from dust and the deteriorative action of the air — especially where inferior pigments have been used — but also to bring out the darks. The retouch varnish has the further advantage of allowing the artist to paint over it if he wishes to make changes. On the other hand—”

“Mr. Casavant.”

“On the other hand, this thin lacquer is a temporary expedient only. Most artists allow anywhere from three to twelve months to elapse, and then they will apply a permanent varnish made from dammar resin. At this point one might say that not only is the painting finished, but its mechanistic aspects also.”

“But Mr. Casavant—”

“I might interpolate,” said Roger Casavant, “in the aforementioned connection, that Fanny Adams had strongly individualistic work habits. For example, she did not believe in applying a preliminary retouch varnish; she never used it. She claimed that it had a slightly yellowing effect — a moot point among artists. Of course, she used only the finest pigments, what we know as permanent colors, which are remarkably resistant to the action of air. She did use dammar varnish, but never sooner than ten to twelve months after she completed the painting. So you will find no varnish on this canvas—”

“Mr. Casavant,” said Ferriss Adams. “What we want to find out is: What are your reasons for making the positive assertion that this is a finished painting?”

“My reasons?” Casavant glanced at Adams as if he had said a dirty word. He placed his joined hands to his lips and studied Fanny Adams’s ceiling, seeking there the elementary language necessary to convey his meaning to the brute ears about him. “The work of Fanny Adams is above all characterized by an impression of realism, absolute realism achieved through authentic detail. The secret of her power as an artist lies precisely there... in what I might call her primitive scrupulosity to life and life-objects.”

“Please, Mr. Casavant—”

“In her quaint way, Fanny Adams expressed it thusly: ‘I paint,’ she would say, ‘what I see.’ Now, of course, regarded superficially, that’s an ingenuous statement. Every painter paints what he sees. The esthetic variety of artistic experience comes about because two painters looking at the same object see it in two different ways — one as a disoriented basic form, perhaps, the other as an arrangement of symbols. The point is that when Fanny Adams said, ‘I paint what I see,’ she meant it literally!” Casavant glared triumphantly at Ferriss Adams. “It is one of the great charms of her painting style. She never — I repeat, never — painted from imagination, and she never — I repeat, never — painted from memory. If she painted a tree, it was not any old tree, it was not the tree as she remembered having seen it in her girlhood, or even yesterday, it was the tree, the particular tree she was looking at, the particular tree she was looking at now, at that precise moment in time; in all its nowness, as it were. If Fanny Adams painted a sky, it was the sky of the instant. If she painted a barn, you may be sure it was the very barn before her eyes—”

“Excuse me for interrupting, Mr. Casavant,” said Ferriss Adams with a sigh, “but I thought you told me this morning... I mean, how do you know this painting is finished?”

“My dear sir,” said Casavant with a kindly smile, “one cannot answer a question like that in a phrase. Now you will recall that a moment ago I referred to Fanny Adams’s work habits. They had one further oddity. Just as she never deviated a hair’s breadth from the now-object, so she never deviated a hair’s breadth from her work habits. I call your attention to the F.A. in the lower left-hand corner of this canvas, which is the manner in which she invariably signed her works; and I repeat for the information of the court and jury that never in the case of any canvas from Fanny Adams’s brush, in the course of her entire career, did she stroke in that F.A. until the painting part of the picture was consummated. Never! However, that’s a childishly oversimplified reason. When we deal with an artist we deal with a living, pulsing personality, not a lifeless thing under a microscope. There are esthetic reasons, there are emotional reasons if you will, for pronouncing this painting utterly, irrevocably, perfectly finished.”

“I think the oversimplified reason you’ve already given, Mr. Casavant,” murmured Judge Shinn, “will suffice.”

Ferriss Adams flung the Judge a look of sheer worship. “Now, Mr. Casavant, an analysis of the defendant’s movements indicates that he must have quit these premises at approximately the time Aunt Fanny Adams was assaulted and murdered. Also, there is a statement, now part of the court record, made by defendant on the night of his arrest. We’re interested in testing defendant’s statement for truthfulness—”

Andrew Webster opened his mouth, but he shut it again at a sign from Judge Shinn.

“—for if in any particular it can be shown that his statement lies, there will be a strong presumption that his denial of guilt is a lie, too.”

Old Andy struggled, and won.

“In his statement defendant claims, Mr. Casavant, that a moment before leaving this house he pushed the swinging door from the kitchen open a crack and looked into the studio. He says he saw Aunt Fanny at her easel, her back to him, still working on this painting. Since that was just about the time she was murdered, and since you have pronounced the painting finished, wouldn’t you say that the defendant, then, is lying when he maintains that the painting was still being worked on?”

“My God, My God,” mumbled Andy Webster.

“My dear sir,” said Roger Casavant with an elegant whimsicality, “I can’t tell who saw what or when, or who was lying or telling the truth. I can only tell you that the painting on this easel is finished. For the rest, you’ll have to work out your personal conclusions.”

“Thank you, Mr. Casavant.” Ferriss Adams wiped his streaming cheeks. “Your witness.”

Judge Webster strode up to the witness chair so determinedly that the witness recoiled slightly.

“As you’ve no doubt gathered, Mr. Casavant,” began the old lawyer, “this is a rather unusual trial. We’re allowing ourselves more latitude — to say the least — than is customary. Let’s take this in detail. A study of the relative times and certain other factors shows that the defendant must have left the Adams house at approximately the time Mrs. Adams was murdered, as Mr. Adams has stated — within two or three minutes, at most. The time of the murder is fixed as having taken place at exactly two-thirteen P.M. I ask you, sir: Isn’t it possible for the defendant to have left this house at, let us say, two-ten, and at two-ten Mrs. Fanny Adams was still working on this painting?”

“I beg pardon?”

“Let me put it another way: Isn’t it possible that in the three minutes between two-ten and two-thirteen Fanny Adams finished this painting — the last brush stroke, the initials of the signature, or whatever it was?”

“Well, naturally,” said Casavant in an annoyed tone. “There comes a moment — one might say the moment — when a painting, any painting, is definitely and finally completed. Whether that moment came before the defendant looked in, or as he looked in, or after he looked in, is not, sir, within my competence.”

“How right you are,” muttered Andy Webster; but Johnny heard him. “No, just another minute, Mr. Casavant. You have asserted that Fanny Adams painted only what she saw. Tell me, did she paint everything she saw?”

“What’s that, what’s that?”

“Well! Suppose she was painting the barn and cornfield as seen through her window. Suppose there was a pile of firewood in the lean-to within her view. Would she include the firewood in her painting?”

“Oh, I see what you mean,” said Casavant languidly. “No, she did not paint everything she saw. That would be an absurdity.”

“Then she might decide to include the firewood or she might decide not to include the firewood?”

“Exactly. Every painter must be selective. Obviously. By the simplest laws of composition. However, what she did include in a painting was at least a part of the scene she was painting.”

“But it is true that the wood might have been stacked in the lean-to, in plain sight, and still she might not have included the wood in the picture?”

“That is true.”

“That’s all, thank you!”

“Mr. Casavant!” Ferriss Adams jumped to his feet. “You say that even if the firewood was in the lean-to, Aunt Fanny might have chosen not to include it in this painting?”

“Yes.”

“But isn’t it just as true that the fact that she didn’t paint in any firewood doesn’t mean it was there?”

Casavant blinked. “Would you mind repeating that, please?”

“Well,” said Adams, “if the firewood was included in the painting, then — on the basis of your familiarity with Fanny Adams’s painting habits and so forth — you’d be positive the firewood was in the lean-to. She painted only what she actually saw, you said.”

“That is correct. If there were firewood in this painted lean-to before us, I can say without equivocation that there would have been firewood in the real lean-to.”

“But there is no firewood in this painted lean-to!” said Adams triumphantly. “That’s a fact! An absolute, undeniable fact! Isn’t it more likely, then, that since there is no firewood in the painting there was no firewood in the lean-to? And if there was no firewood in the lean-to, the defendant lied?”

“Why, that’s sophistry!” shouted Andy Webster. “That doesn’t follow at all! It’s going around in circles!”

Roger Casavant glanced helplessly at Judge Shinn. “I can only repeat, gentlemen, this painting is finished.”

The Judge looked at Andy Webster, and Andy Webster looked at the Judge, and both men looked at the jury. Their faces were a whitewashed wall, unsmudged by comprehension.

“Are you finished with the witness, gentlemen?” asked Judge Shinn.

“Yes, your honor,” said Ferriss Adams. “And as far as the People are concerned, we’re through—”

“Just a minute.”

Everyone in the room turned. It was the juror in the last seat of the second row, Juror Number Twelve. He was scribbling rapidly on the back of an envelope.

“What is it, Mr. Shinn?” asked the Judge, leaning forward.

Johnny folded the envelope. “Mind passing this to his honor, Constable?”

Burney Hackett took the folded envelope gingerly and gave it to Judge Shinn.

The Judge unfolded it.

It read: Eureka!!!! Call a recess. I think I’ve got something.