That Royle Girl/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI
The court arose and the act instantly transmuted every person in the room. The witness stepped down, a pale and quivering girl; the jurymen filed awkwardly from their box and, instead of being a center of attention, they huddled in an aloof, reluctant cluster, pariahs approached by none but the bailiffs, who immediately herded them through the narrow portal to the jury room. The judge, a plethoric man in a black robe, retired heavily to his chambers.
The guards, who waited to escort the prisoner to the jail, stood with indulgent patience while Max Elmen whispered pompously to his client and clapped him loudly upon the back. A couple of reporters—a stolid, skeptical-appearing youth and a tall, perceptive girl, who spoke very rapidly—plied Calvin with questions improper for him to answer, as they very well knew. The girl flitted away and he followed her with his gaze, for she went to catechize the witness. Immediately Herman Elmen interposed, and Calvin caught only a glimpse of the Royle girl's profile. She was biting her lips, he saw; and now she was trying to smile.
"Where're we going to lunch?" Ellison asked of Calvin.
He would have liked to escape alone, but Ellison kept beside him on the way downstairs, and together they returned to the State's attorney's offices, where Heminway met them and asked, "How was the going this morning?"
"Not so good," Ellison replied. "Half an hour ago it looked like we had 'em in a hole, but Elmen put the Royle girl on the stand with half an hour to start her stuff, and she certainly worked up a wonderful curtain."
"When do you take her over?" inquired Heminway.
"We'll get her to-day," said Ellison.
"What's on here?" Calvin changed the subject at the opening of an office door through which debouched several dark-haired, swarthy young men of the type which Calvin classified as "southern European."
"Part of the morning pick-up on Considine," Heminway informed, referring thus to the more important of the two shootings reported to the State's attorney's office over night. Considine, though still in his twenties, was a man of no small political importance and was credited with a fortune of half a million gained by bootlegging and as profits of his roadhouse.
"Oh, how's he?" asked Ellison, who of course had been shut off from immediate news by his presence in the court-room.
"Recovered consciousness 'bout an hour ago, but he's done."
"Talk, did he?"
"He did not."
"Are we holding anybody?" asked Calvin, as the visible part of the pick-up passed toward the elevators and evidently was not to be detained.
"What chance?" said Heminway. "Who'll talk? Considine knows he's finished; but he won't say a word. What do you figure we'll get out of boys who still have their health and want to enjoy life, liberty and their opportunities under the eighteenth amendment a little longer? They wouldn't even admit that Baretta and Considine had fallen out."
Ellison laughed and opened his door. "Did Baretta do it, d'you suppose," he asked, when the three entered the room, "or was he just back of it?"
"Just back of it," said Heminway. "A subject upon whom George performs personally doesn't return to consciousness—even temporarily. Where're we going to lunch?"
Calvin recollected the broad-shouldered young man who had approached him after the Royle girl had dropped in his pocket the money for the music book on the evening of his visit to the automat, and he prickled hotly at memory of his fatuity that night and later. How she had lied, perjuring herself by act and word in her sworn testimony regarding the relations between Ketlar and herself! Lies, expert lies and practiced deceptions and false appearances had composed her stock in trade from the first moment he had seen her! And how she had duped him so that, in spite of himself, he had borne reveries of her and dwelt upon them and become unable to banish them, while all the time she had been playing upon him in preparation for this appearance upon the witness stand for the purpose of freeing Ketlar in order that she might have him.
The heat of the office became insufferable to Calvin, who pulled on his overcoat and went out, accompanied by the others. He made no suggestion; but, as usual with them, he chose a course and they followed, this time turning eastward to the boulevard and the gleaming tower of the Wrigley building.
It was one of those winter days when the air, even at noon, remains at below zero temperature; and what breeze there was blew from the lake. It cut Calvin's forehead and cheek, but he did not, like the others, lower his head to lessen the sting; he liked the bite of the cold this day which was still insufficient to subdue the heat ebullient within him.
Two o'clock and the call to court, with the People again opposing Frederic Ketlar, reinvested the judge and the jury with the dignities of officers of Death. The accused sat solemnly in his place; the witness was reinstated upon the stand.
"Do you recollect the evening of a Saturday, the second in October?" asked Max Elmen.
"Perfectly," replied Joan Daisy.
"What were you doing upon that evening?"
"I was at work until about half-past eleven in the office in which I was and am now employed. A special job was on hand and I was reading back and correcting specifications which I had written during the day."
"When you left the office what did you do?"
"I took the elevated train for Wilson Avenue."
"Alone?"
"Alone."
"Please relate to the jury your subsequent actions."
"I reached Wilson Avenue almost exactly at midnight," related Joan Daisy, facing the jury at the cue from Mr. Elmen.
"One moment," interrupted Max. "How did you fix the time?"
"The window lights in the stores were just going out."
"So the time is now Sunday morning. Proceed."
This cue released Joan Daisy to an uninterrupted relation of the truth for several minutes, and she told directly to the jury how she had gone to the apartment building in which she lived, and passed it to go alone to the lake shore where, early upon that Sunday morning, she sat in the sand.
This truth, as she very well knew from her rehearsal with Max Elmen, was far from an ideal bit of testimony; indeed, it was not satisfactory at all, and many a time Mr. Elmen had attempted to better it, but his improvements and embellishments always had failed to sound more convincing, and neither Mr. Elmen nor his son Herman nor Mr. Kleppman nor Mr. Wein, who also had been called into consultation upon this difficult point, had succeeded in devising a more plausible reason for a girl going alone to the lake shore upon an October midnight. Max would have omitted the incident altogether were it not essential to his case, so at last he had bid her to tell it just as it had happened up to the point after she had left the beach and when she looked in the window of Adele Ketlar's flat and saw Adele and a man.
Here Max put in the question: "You saw the man clearly?" to remind the witness that now she must depart from the truth.
"Very clearly," lied Joan Daisy, looking at Mr. Elmen.
"Did you recognize him?" challenged Max.
"No. He was some one I had never seen before."
"Have you seen him since?"
"No."
"Describe him."
"What I first noticed was his dark hair," lied Joan Daisy.
"How dark?" Insisted Mr. Elmen.
"Almost black or black," Joan Daisy repeated her perjury.
"You saw this distinctly?" Mr. Elmen drove her on.
"Very distinctly. It immediately attracted my attention because of course Mr. Ketlar's hair is light."
Calvin was upon his feet and she gazed at him, feeling herself shudder and trying to prevent it from becoming visible. Lies, lies! she despaired; he would catch her in this one; but if she told on the stand the truth, saying that the man she had seen was so like Ket that she thought he was Ket, why then—so Mr. Elmen and Herman Elmen and Mr. Kleppman and Mr. Wein all had said—with her own hand she would be slipping the noose about Ket's neck.
"Was he tall or short?" questioned Mr. Elmen quickly, stepping forward in a manner immediately to draw her eyes to him.
"Short," lied Joan Daisy.
"You saw this distinctly?"
"Very distinctly."
"How could you judge his height?"
"Tn relation to Adele Ketlar before whom he stood."
"What was the effect of this upon you?"
"Naturally it surprised and troubled me."
"What did you do?"
"I went home at once," Joan Daisy said, seizing upon the truth again, and feeling it like a solid, if temporary, support after a sensation of having been afloat. Mr. Clarke, she saw, had sat down. "Before I reached home I saw Frederic Ketlar coming from the boulevard."
"That is the opposite direction from the lake?"
"Yes."
"You went at what pace from the building, where you saw Adele Ketlar and the stranger whom you have described, to the point where you met Frederic Ketlar coming from the boulevard?"
"At a fast walk."
"Tell the jury if there was anything unusual either in Fred's appearance or manner."
"Nothing at all," said Joan Daisy, obediently facing about. "He was lively and cheerful as usual."
"Was there anything whatever in the nature of an appointment between you two that night?"
"Our meeting was entirely accidental. He had hit upon a new melody, when improvising at the Echo Garden that evening, and he had come home a little earlier than usual to work out the tune better on his piano. He was humming it when I met him and we went in, and he played it for me."
"Did you tell him that you had just seen his wife and another man?"
"I did not."
"Did anything which he said or did give you any reason to suspect he had any knowledge of the situation you saw?"
"We did not talk about his wife or personal affairs at all. We talked only about music. He was in the midst of composing his new piece and he couldn't think or talk of anything else. I got so interested that I didn't think about anything else, after he played for me."
"You may tell to the jury the nature of your talk with him," bid Max, and Joan Daisy turned earnestly and told the truth:
"After he'd played his piece to me, gentlemen, and his eyes were shining with it, he said to me, 'It's great, isn't it? It's great!'
"'It's good, Ket,' I said. Gentlemen, I've told you something about the idea I had of what he could do in music. Gentlemen, it was a good jazz tune he'd played; they'd clapped and clapped for it at the Echo that night; but I listened to it with that dream of mine in my head; and I couldn't tell him it was great; and I didn't. He didn't like it, of course; he was disappointed; so I tried to tell him what I thought—how he might be like Mozart. That's what we were talking about, gentlemen, when he—he," she turned to Calvin and gazed at him, "he thinks we were talking about killing Ket's wife."
"You must not accuse the State's attorney," Max Elmen interjected quickly. "It is a privilege of his position to endow himself with any idea, however preposterous or unsupported by evidence. After he had played his piece for you, what did you do?"
"We immediately went upstairs to my home," replied Joan Daisy and her gaze, which had been drawn to Max, visited Mr. Clarke again with her last word.
"Who was in your home at the time?"
"My mother was in her room, which was next to the one where Mr. Ketlar and I talked."
"Did anything especial occur after you entered your apartment?"
"Yes. I went into the coat closet to hang up my things and I was reaching up to a shelf to put away my hat. Mr. Ketlar stepped forward in his quick way to help me—I am not tall, you see—and as he approached, a scarf which I was wearing caught the handle of the door, which I pulled as I raised my arm; so the door flew over and Mr. Ketlar struck the edge of the door and cut his forehead.
"He went to the bathroom and stopped the bleeding and washed away the blood. Naturally, this stopped our argument over his music, and my father came in just then.
"We turned on the radio, getting Los Angeles."
"How did you know that?"
"The dials were tuned to Los Angeles; besides, the announcer spoke Los Angeles clearly both before and after the song."
"Which was?" prompted Max.
"'Home, Sweet Home.' We heard it, the three of us together, Frederic Ketlar, my father and I, from the first verse to the end, and the announcement of the station, Los Angeles, afterwards."
"Ketlar, then, was with you continuously from the time you met him in front of the building until after the finish of the singing of 'Home, Sweet Home' in Los Angeles?"
"Yes," Joan Daisy swore.
"And he was with you how long after that?"
"Perhaps ten minutes. Then he went downstairs and I heard him in his room."
"What did you do?"
"I went to bed in my room," Joan Daisy related, grasping again the solid support of truth. "I went to bed and to sleep," she faced the jury, "for I had no idea then that Adele Ketlar was dead, much less did I have any part in it at all. I went to sleep, I tell you, thinking of Ket's music and the music of the Chicago Orchestra and my dream—oh, I've told you that. Well, I had it that night, for I'd no idea that anything was wrong until policemen in the halls waked me up, and they arrested Ket, and I went down to see what was the matter, and they told me that Adele was shot and that Ket had done it; and they went for me and asked me questions when I could hardly think and didn't know what they were saying or I was saying, but they made me answer, and Mr. Clarke came and . . ."
Calvin arose to his feet and the witness stared at him.
Max Elmen advanced in protective posture as though to ward from his witness a physical attack; he swung, confronting Calvin and glaring at him under drawn brows; suddenly, with an abrupt shrug, he visibly altered his impulse and yielded.
"Take the witness," he bade.
Calvin placed himself, deliberately, for the cross-examination, standing almost directly in front of the witness and beside his table upon which his notes lay close at hand. When he looked at her, the witness' eyes gazed directly into his eyes, and when he glanced down at his table, he felt that the witness followed the fumbling of his hands amid his memoranda.
He had no need of his notes; every answer this witness had uttered seemed perfectly recorded in his brain which classified the evidence for him in orderly sequence. His mind was wholly reliable, in contrast to his emotions which confused and impeded him. His heart was beating in thumps which obtruded themselves into his thought.
"You have a clear recollection," he challenged the Royle girl, looking up and finding her eyes upon him, "of the circumstances of your first meeting with Frederic Ketlar?"
"Very clear, Mr. Clarke."
"You have told the truth in regard to those circumstances?" Calvin questioned, deliberately, and at once, as he expected, Elmen was upon his feet, crying loudly, "I object!"
"Your honor," said Calvin, advancing, "the entire question is the veracity and character of this witness. The defense has been permitted to go into personal relations in considerable detail in the endeavor to establish one impression which I mean to show is contrary to the fact."
"I object," repeated Elmen, "to the form of the question."
"I will change it," said Calvin. "Do you wish to alter any of your evidence in regard to your first meeting with Frederic Ketlar?" he asked the witness.
"I object!" shouted Elmen.
"Overruled," said the judge.
"I save an exception to the ruling!" declared Elmen loudly and gazed pointedly at the court stenographer to see that he was writing it into the record.
Joan Daisy looked to the judge who nodded to her to answer and she turned to Assistant State's Attorney Clarke.
"No," she said.
"Was the occasion of your leaving the hotel actually a matter of eviction because of nonpayment of bills?" asked Calvin.
"I object!" pronounced Elmen.
"Overruled," said the judge. "You offered these matters. I cannot forbid cross-examination upon them."
"I save an exception!" ordered Elmen, and Joan Daisy knew that she must answer and again she must lie.
"Do you remember under what name your family was registered at that hotel?" Calvin proceeded.
"I object!" protested Elmen.
"Overruled."
"Enter an exception!" Elmen commanded the stenographer, and as the question, which the witness was obliged to answer, was one which he had not foreseen, he signaled an answer to her by clasping his hands, the left over the right.
This meant, "Answer no," and Joan Daisy saw the sign, but "no" would be another lie, and what would be the use of it? Herself, she had told Mr. Clarke on the night of their meeting in the automat how she had spent her life when she was little, "dead-beating and dodging sheriffs and being thrown out of flats and hotels." Moreover, to answer "no" would be an admission that her family had gone under many names, otherwise of course she would remember the name.
"Ravenel—John Mersfield Ravenel was the name my father used at that time," she replied.
"You also used the name Ravenel?"
"I object!" protested Elmen hotly. The judge overruled and Elmen entered another exception, and now after nearly every question Elmen objected, the judge overruled, Elmen entered an exception until their combat ran into a sort of refrain, "object: overruled: exception," as Calvin delivered his prepared attack.
Upon the table beside him lay a report, written up in minute detail by department operatives who had improved the weeks following Ketlar's arrest by a thorough examination into the past activities of the accused and also into the histories of his principal witnesses. With especial thoroughness they had recited incidents, gossip and hearsay regarding the girl, sometimes Joan Daisy Ravenel, sometimes Joan Daisy Rowland, often of other names, and most recently known as Joan Daisy Royle.
Calvin had the book at hand in order that he might refer to it, if need be, but he knew the pages, having to do with her by heart. Names, places, times, presented themselves inexorably to him and in their proper order as he proceeded inflexibly with his cross-questioning to make her admit the fact that when her family left the hotel in which Ketlar had been employed, they had been disgracefully ejected for nonpayment of the hotel bill and that the purpose of the frequent change of the family name had been to escape pursuit and to facilitate the obtaining of accommodations by false pretense and fraud.
"No . . . no . . . no . . ." Calvin heard her deny, gazing straight at him and lying to him.
He was determined to exclude from his mind, as he confronted her in cross-examination, every personal contact with her; he meant to treat her as a witness, and a false witness, of low character and an accomplice in spirit, if not in fact, to the killing of Adele Ketlar; but sudden, startling recollections assailed him. He saw the girl, not as she sat perjuring herself to save Ketlar, but as she was when she had confessed to him, by the light of the street lamp, how her life had been "dead-beating" and dodging sheriffs and being thrown into the street, and how she couldn't figure a way out of it for her family.
He thrust this from him and concentrated upon his attack; and soon, with his questions and with the judge overruling Elmen's objections shouted to help her, Calvin had her contradicting herself. She lied bravely and cleverly; but, as she herself well knew, lies could prevail only temporarily, when some one else possessed the truth about you. So Calvin trapped her and showed the jury out of her own lips that she lied, and when he thought that he was about to crush her she cast at him:
"You have it; we were thrown out of that hotel, Mr. Clarke. But what I told you about Ket was true; he was awfully nice to me; and if we were being thrown out, and he was so nice to me, doesn't that make it better of him?"
"After the occasion when you and your family were being ejected from the hotel at which Ketlar was working," Calvin resumed a few moments later, "you did not meet him again until last September?"
"No."
"When you found yourselves standing side by side, strangers, before a shop window on Wilson Avenue?"
"Yes."
"Which spoke to the other first?"
"He did; but not before I showed that I recognized him," Joan Daisy completed quickly.
"After eight years you recognized him as a man you had known and not merely as some one you had seen and were willing to pick up?"
"I object!" shouted Max Elmen, with hot indignation.
"Objection sustained," ruled the judge; and Calvin flushed warmly, but was not to be distracted from his duty to disclose the character of the witness, as he believed her to be.
"You say you recognized him before you encouraged him to speak to you?"
"Yes."
"Immediately he recalled to you the circumstances of your last meeting?"
"Yes."
"Which were, in fact, that he had seen you thrown out of the hotel where he worked, to use your own words?"
"Yes."
"This, then, was what he recalled to you?"
"Yes."
"Upon his rediscovery of you, therefore, he looked upon you as a person who had been undergoing unfortunate experiences, to say the least."
"I object!" shouted Max.
"Sustained."
"He mentioned his wife to you almost immediately, you said?" continued Calvin.
"He told me that he was married, and he told me, very happily, about his daughter," replied Joan Daisy, unwary in two words.
"But he did not speak happily of his wife?" Calvin caught her at once.
"He told me that he and his wife were separated."
"Whereupon he went with you to the building in which you lived and engaged a room in the same entry, immediately below your room?"
"I object!" cried Max, in outrage, "and resent the implication of Mr. Clarke."
"The State," retorted Calvin impersonally and very white and with his lips bloodless, "at present offers no implication except as the facts, as they are brought out, present their inescapable conclusion."
"Your honor," appealed Max, pulling a large, gold watch from his pocket, "it is only a little before the usual hour for adjournment. Miss Royle has had a most wearing day," he said with an emotional quaver and glanced at Joan Daisy in signal for her to droop.
She failed to see it; she sat straight, confronting Calvin Clarke and defying him, and so the judge saw her, when he turned from Max to examine her.
"You are able to go on?" he asked her, kindly.
"Perfectly able," replied Joan Daisy.
"The State is prepared to proceed?" inquired the judge, as a matter of formality.
Calvin stood quietly, betraying by nothing else than his paleness the longing within him to escape his next duty.
"Thoroughly," he replied to the judge; and thoroughly, as he was prepared, he proceeded with his attack upon the character of the witness.
He left the Criminal Court building with no doubt that he had done right, although his own questions, together with the answers which he had forced from her, haunted his mind miserably. He had not succeeded in obtaining from her admission of the act of wrong-doing with Ketlar; but no one, he felt, could longer be at a loss as to what had been the relations between Ketlar and her.
He had eluded Ellison, after having talked over matters for a few minutes in the state's attorney's offices, and he was on the street alone where the keen cold of the early January evening stimulated him, physically, but left him emotionally fagged. He kept running over the questions which he had cast at the girl in the witness chair who had replied to him, squarely, her blue eyes even to his; he ran over her answers, not merely in his mind, but upon his lips, to reproduce her inflection as she had refuted and denied his implications.
He felt sure that he had demonstrated, even to the most stupid juror, how she lied and how utterly untrustworthy she was, and the conclusion that she was also immoral seemed to him inevitable; yet some of her replies clung in Calvin's own mind and confused him, as they had not in court, and there stood before him a troubling image of her, as she had faced him throughout the day in court, with her head up, her brow very white, her eyes very blue and a pulse in her throat beating visibly at a sudden leap of her heart when he assailed her and her white hands clasped and unclasped the ponderous arms of the oaken chair.
Calvin assigned his mind to other affairs, recalling how Heminway had mentioned to him, just before he had left the Criminal Court building, that Considine was dead and had maintained silence as to the identity of his assailant.
"Nobody's talking," Heminway had added. "And nobody will. They're going to 'shoot it out.'"
"They," as Calvin well knew, were the members of the numerous and violent guilds of young men and girls who, to most practical purposes, went their ways beyond reach of the law in and about this great midland center of American civilization.
"They" operated the gambling joints, disreputable dance-halls, roadhouses and pool-rooms patronized by the citizenry; "they" robbed outright, at the point of the pistol, when it so pleased them; "they" held up, blackmailed and bootlegged. Frequently, and it seemed to Calvin that the gentlemen of the gun resorted to this for the spice of danger in it, they "hi-jacked" one another; that is, one rum-runner held up another upon the highway and captured his truck-loads of illegal liquor.
The late Mr. Considine seemed to have conducted some such an operation against a fleet of trucks owned by George Baretta, and the report of the matter to Three-G. George undoubtedly was the forerunner of Considine's prompt demise. The difficulty of proving this fact, which no informed person did doubt, was well exemplified by Mr. Considine's discreet silence to his last.
Probably two motives influenced him; one, fear that his family and friends might immediately suffer his fate if he spoke; second, a preference to trust for vengeance to the automatic pistols of his partners rather than to the law. So the opposing parties would "shoot it out" between themselves.
Calvin reached the boulevard and ascended the slope of the bridge until, to north and south, he saw the city speckling the night from earth to sky.
"They've put together a lot of steel and stone," he said to himself, striking with his heel the steel and stone beneath him, "and call it a city, when murderers 'shoot it out' on the streets and they make a trial, when you bring a criminal to trial, a play performance."
He crossed the river and in the cold walked on, with his hatred for Chicago never so bitter as upon this night after he no longer could let himself doubt—for had he not shown it to others?—that the Royle girl was disreputable.
He entered a club and immediately went out again to avoid talking to friends; he dined alone in a strange restaurant, tormented by the sight of headlines of the evening papers which quoted his questions to the Royle girl together with her responses. He could suffer association with no one, yet he would not return to his rooms to be alone. He felt very homesick for Clarke's Ferry, astonishing as it was for homesickness to seize him now when he was thirty. When he dwelt upon his home, however, dissatisfactions persisted; he thought of his walk with Melicent and of the Barlow place taken over by a Greek, whereby he returned to the trial and to the Greek, Andreapolos, who was foreman of the jury and who had maintained throughout the day his external attitude, looking on and estimating, never giving his mind and his emotions into the keeping of Elmen or of the witness or of any other. ······· "You saw clearly," asked Calvin, "the man whom you say was with Adele Ketlar?"
"Very clearly," replied Joan Daisy. It was near the end of her second day upon the witness stand.
"Was he tall or short?"
"Short."
"When Police-officer Cummins questioned you, immediately after you told him of seeing a man with Adele Ketlar," continued Calvin, "did he ask you this question and did you make this reply? Question: 'Did you see him? Was he tall or short?' Answer: 'Tall, I think.'"
"I don't remember what I said," testified Joan Daisy.
"Do you now remember the color of the hair of the man whom you say you saw through the window?"
"Yes; it was dark—nearly black," lied Joan Daisy.
"When Officer Cummins examined you, did he ask you this question and did you make this reply? Question: 'Was he light or dark?' Answer: 'I—don't know.'"
She evaded again with "I don't remember," as she had been drilled by Mr. Elmen, who had impressed upon her that only thus could she save Ket; and thus was repudiated her entire statement to the police.
"When you met Ketlar outside the building in which you both lived," Calvin picked another point of attack, "what time was it?"
"About half-past twelve."
"After midnight, you mean?"
"Yes," replied Joan Daisy, shivering a little.
"When you entered the building with him, where did you go?"
"To his room."
"You were alone with him in his room after midnight?"
"With him and his piano!" Joan Daisy cried. "All the time we were there he played his piano; that's why I went in!"
"Did he have whiskey and sherry in the room?" Calvin proceeded relentlessly.
"Yes," admitted Joan Daisy, though she knew what was coming, but Mr. Elmen had warned her not to deny the drinking because the police evidence had established it too firmly.
"Did Ketlar offer you sherry?" demanded Calvin.
"One wineglassful."
"Did you drink it?"
"I did," confessed Joan Daisy, desperately.
"Did he also drink?"
"Yes."
"Who poured out the drinks, you or he?"
"He did," replied Joan Daisy, resorting to the truth and not foreseeing the catch in the next questions.
"Was he playing the piano while he was pouring out the drinks?"
"No."
"Or while he was drinking with you?"
"No."
"What proportion of the time, which you spent with him in his room, was actually occupied by piano playing?"
"I would say—half."
"A few moments ago you said 'all the time.'"
"Yes."
"Besides drinking with him, what else did you do with him in his room?"
"We talked music; we talked music, I told you—music!" Joan Daisy cried, driven beside herself for the minute. "He was playing for me what he'd just written and I was trying to tell him what sort of music he might write—music, music, that's all we talked and all we did!"
"He hurt his head," said Calvin, "when he was in your company?"
"Yes," replied Joan Daisy.
"This was a result of your talk about music?"
"He ran into the door upstairs in my flat, I tell you!"
"Was your father in the flat at the time?"
"No; yes!" she cried, answering truthfully at first, because for the last few minutes she had been able to tell the truth; but immediately she remembered the prepared story of Dads' presence upstairs.
"Which do you mean—no or yes?" Calvin challenged.
"Yes," replied Joan Daisy, gasping in dread that she was losing her grip upon herself.
"Your father was in your flat when you and Ketlar came upstairs from his flat?"
"No; but my father came in immediately afterwards."
"He saw Ketlar?"
"Of course."
"And spoke with him?"
"Yes."
"When Officers Denson and Goudy questioned you, did they ask you these questions and did you make these replies? Question: 'He'—meaning your father—'saw Ketlar here with you?' Answer: 'No.' Question: 'How was that?' Answer: 'My father doesn't like him. I had to hide him for a few moments.'"
"I can't remember what I may have said in my dazed mental condition after the police waked me up and accused me of having part in a murder of which I knew nothing until they told me." Joan Daisy repeated the answer ordered by Mr. Elmen for such an emergency.
And this reply Calvin met again and again as he produced the police questions and the girl's own answers to prove that she had elaborated two contradictory accounts of her own and Ketlar's actions upon that night. But upon one point she clung, and he could not shake her; Ketlar had been with her in her flat when the radio brought "Home, Sweet Home" from Los Angeles; and it was during that song, so the State itself had shown, that Adele had been shot. So the State struck its final blows upon the character and credibility of the witness.
"Throughout this evidence," said Calvin, facing her, "you have claimed that your interest in Ketlar was aroused and maintained by your belief that he might do great things in music; you did not mean to marry him?"
"I object!" shouted Max Elmen, springing forward.
"Sustained."
"Was there, between Ketlar and you, an agreement of marriage?"
"I object!" shouted Max.
"I will make my question more explicit," offered Calvin. "At any time, before the death of Adele Ketlar, did Ketlar suggest marriage to you?"
"I object!"
"Overruled," said the judge; and Max took his exception.
"No," lied Joan Daisy.
"Is there now an agreement, conditional upon his acquittal or otherwise, by which he will marry you?"
She denied it, and Calvin suddenly was incited to mock her, so sure was he that she perjured herself and played all this pretense to win Ketlar for herself.
"You mean your interest in him is still purely musical?"
"I am interested to help clear an innocent man," she replied, "especially a boy who, with no help from any one, made himself famous and who will be, if he is left alone, a great musician."
Ellison pulled at Calvin's sleeve, but he refused to heed it. "When and where," he demanded, in his exasperation, "did you acquire this great ability for ambition for another?"
"Where's my home? you mean," she cast back at him, with a sudden vehemence which took him and all the court by surprise. "He has a home, your honor!" she cried at the judge. "Gentlemen of the jury, he has a home in Massachusetts which was burned in Queen Anne's war. That was about 1708, if you don't know; I didn't. But don't worry over him; his home was built again in 1722; his family's had it ever since, ready for him when he came. . . ."
Calvin felt his face aflame.
"You must confine yourself to answering the question," he heard the judge interfering in his behalf.
"I'm trying to answer him, judge. I know what he means. He means, how can I, with the sort of home he's been showing you all, how can I dream a decent thing about any one and get an ambition for something big when I've been living around, under different names, in hotels and flats and being flung out of them? Where's my home? he asked me once; and that's what he means now.
"Where I live, Mr. Clarke, isn't so old as where you live; it doesn't go back to Queen Anne's war or even John Adams' administration; but it's a whole lot bigger place; it's Chicago. When you didn't find any family portraits of people who'd fought with Knox or at Antietam in my flat, you figured I couldn't be any good; I couldn't get any big idea. Well, I never spent much time looking at the walls of that flat; I didn't live there. There's a wall I've looked at, though, that's got bigger names than any Clarke—Shubert, Beethoven, Wagner, and Mozart in stone letters; and inside the wall, where anybody can go for seventy-five cents, the finest orchestra in the world plays the greatest music; and the program tells you about it, if you need to know. That's where I got my ambition for Ket, Mr. Clarke!"
The judge interrupted her, Calvin realized, but short of physically silencing her, he could not have stopped her, and the judge had not really desired it.
Calvin recollected, after a few moments, that he must put another question or dismiss the witness. Having nothing himself, he glanced down at Ellison, who shortly shook his head. "That's all," said Calvin, and Max Elmen, grinning his delight, advanced with ostentatious gallantry to escort the girl from the stand.
Nimbly Max's mind diagnosed the fresh elements in the immediate situation and discerned that, if ever it could be said to be safe to present Mr. James Morton Royle to a court of law, the extraordinary occasion had arrived.
Dads, debonair and entirely distinguished in his new (and paid-for) cutaway of dark gray, took the oath with one hand solemnly raised and two fingers of the other lightly applied to his precisely clipped moustache. His attire, tonsure, complexion, stance and state of being appeared faultless to the eye and wholly pleasing; for Dads never erred by assuming a monopoly of distinction; he dispensed it to all onlookers, endowing them with an agreeable feeling of increased importance by virtue of the mere sight of him.
Particularly flattering was it for a man to feel himself the patron of one who appeared so great a personage, whatever the facts of the matter might be; and no one knew better than Dads the nuances which enlisted liking.
By the time he had seated himself, half the jurymen were smiling. Every man of them had heard this day extensive details of Dads' manner of living, but they remained reluctant to attach the unpleasant narrative to the totally agreeable person before them. Hotel-keepers habitually had suffered from identical reluctances.
Elmen glanced at the jury and blandly, with appropriate deference to Dads, he conducted the direct examination, leading to testimony, couched in Dads' distinguished diction, that the witness was in his apartment at approximately quarter to one upon the morning in question, together with his daughter Joan Daisy and Frederic Ketlar who were continuously in his company in the living-room of the apartment for three-quarters of an hour thereafter and that during this period the radio, tuned to Los Angeles, reproduced in entirety the song of "Home, Sweet Home," which was being sung in Los Angeles.
"In what condition were you when you arrived at your apartment?" challenged Calvin, soon after the start of the cross-examination.
"Pardon?" requested Dads politely.
"In what condition were you?" demanded Calvin, bluntly.
"Do you ask that pejoratively?" questioned Dads.
"What?" asked Calvin, before his wits warned him.
"Since it is plain that you are a preterist," replied Dads, "and a most pejorative preterist, I assume that your question is pejorative. Is that so?"
Calvin felt the eyes of every one upon him; and he knew he had encountered a prepared trap to make him ridiculous. He had no idea what the word pejorative might mean or what was a preterist. No one else in the room, except the witness and Elmen, knew. Not the jury, who sat up expectantly, ready to be amused and wholly without concern, since the weird words in no way challenged their educational qualifications. The judge also was ignorant of their meaning or whether, in fact, they possessed a meaning.
He looked at the state's attorney and waited.
"Answer my question, please," requested Calvin, uncomfortably.
"The witness has asked to have it explained," interposed Elmen, smoothly. "He has that right; is the question pejorative or not?"
"I do not know the meaning of the word," replied Calvin with a frankness which might have turned the incident to his advantage had not Elmen immediately clowned it, making reference to Mr. Clarke of Ha'va'd, slurring the r's in the exaggerated manner which always started a laugh and played on prejudices against the old eastern university.
The audience laughed, and the judge sternly commanded order, while the jury tittered and giggled; and before a set of men, relaxed and ever ready for another laugh, Calvin continued the cross-examination which the witness and Elmen kept as close to the comic as they dared. Comedy was on Elmen's program for his last effect. First he had offered sobs and mother love; next sex; and now, laughs for the concluding act of the entertainment.
Calvin possessed no great knack in dealing with laughs, which, to his mind, had no place in a court of law; also, he was handicapped in being obliged, in his effort to discredit James Morton Royle's testimony, to put queries which had lost their novelty by having been asked of his daughter.
The State dismissed the witness, and court adjourned; in the morning Calvin offered evidence in rebuttal for about an hour, and Elmen required a like period for his surrebuttal. In the afternoon Ellison opened argument by counsel with his carefully prepared, emotional appeal, in the name of the murdered wife and motherless child, for the death penalty for Frederic Ketlar. Before Ellison had been speaking twenty minutes he had several jurymen in tears.
When he sat down, Herman Elmen arose to an eloquent and even more impassioned plea in the name of the pathetic mother of the unjustly accused boy, and in the name of the boy himself, who had been born into the world with every handicap—except a loving mother—and with a stigma upon his name, which, by his own effort and genius, he had yet made great and honorable. Although it was Herman, not Max, who spoke, within ten minutes he had the same jurors wiping their eyes in sympathy for the prisoner. And Herman was speaking chiefly to fill out the afternoon session in order to save the morning for his father's great effort.
So, upon the twelfth morning of the trial, which was Saturday, Max started his plea, fresh and with the jury all attentive and expectant, and Max himself, in person, and also by personifying in comical mimicry the State's witnesses and the State's attorneys, and by repeating respectfully and solemnly the testimony of his own witnesses, staged the grand climax of his show. Throughout two hours, like an expert entertainer playing now upon tragedy, upon pathos, humor, prejudices, sympathies, fears, he held the jurymen and the hearers in the crowded court; and Calvin listened and watched.
His plea must follow, and as his argument ran in his head, he looked up and down the double rows of jurors to estimate how many could be counted upon to decide this serious case upon the merit of the evidence, the credibility of the witnesses and by use, not of their emotions, but their minds. He gazed from face to face of the men of old American names whom he had most willingly accepted, before his peremptory challenges were gone, and conceded them, one after another, to Elmen.
He gazed at the Greek, Andreapolos, whom Max had forced in, and he straightened with a start of warmer blood; for the Greek, who throughout the hearing of evidence had kept his mind his own and sat aloof, looking on, was doing that same thing now; beside him, and perhaps under his influence, another juror of outlandish name scrutinized Max with similar coolness, neither smiling when the others laughed nor having need even once to wipe his eyes.
At a quarter to twelve Max soared into his peroration, and at noon exactly, and dramatically, he stopped. Time, which he had controlled, worked for him; he had maneuvered the State into difficulty; for Calvin either must speak but briefly or must ask for a session upon this Saturday afternoon, or else he must detain the jury over until Monday merely to hear his plea.
He made the choice quickly, for him. "Your honor, if the court will remain, I will finish before one o'clock," he promised; and immediately he began speaking to Andreapolos and the juror at the Greek's side, presenting in logical order the facts of the crime, the evidence against the accused, the fact that the defense rested upon an alibi which in turn rested upon the character of two persons. First, Calvin reviewed the character of the father; then he gave in plain, solemn words his stigmatization of the character of the girl.
At one o'clock it was over; the judge charged the jury who filed out to their deliberations, whereupon Calvin descended to his office. There would be no verdict upon the first ballot or at any early hour, he felt sure; for he counted Andreapolos, the foreman, and one other juror, at least, as sure to vote for conviction; and he could not imagine the weaker, wishy-washy-minded men winning over Andreapolos. Far more likely, the Greek would wear them around at last to his point of view; Andreapolos would outstay them.
Calvin went to lunch, leaving word so that he could be called if the jury reported: later he sought his rooms, whence he telephoned to the Criminal Court building at seven o'clock and learned that the jury was still "out."
He dined solitarily at his rooms, with his mind roving from the jury-room, where he imagined Andreapolos arguing for conviction of Ketlar, to the jail, where the prisoner was in his cell discussing with his cellmates, undoubtedly, his chances of death. Roving, not at Calvin's will but wantonly, his mind visited Anna Folwell, waiting somewhere near the Criminal Courts for the decision of her son's fate; then Calvin's mind sought the Royle girl.
It seemed, in its seeking, to search about from place to place—from a restaurant on Clark Street, near the Criminal Courts, to an automat further away; it boarded a street-car which might be carrying her home to the flat above Ketlar's.
Nowhere could he quite find her; he had the strange sense of entering each place after she just had gone; and the pursuit amazingly tired him. Faster, faster he would send his mind after her, but never could he catch her.
Sharply, at a few minutes before ten, his phone rang and brought him Heminway's voice:
"I'm at the office. Can you come over right away?"
"What is it?" asked Calvin, "a verdict?"
"No sign; but can you come over quick?"
"Why?"
"Come on over."
Calvin started immediately, wondering at the peculiar garrulity of Chicagoans when there was nothing to talk about and their enigmatic muteness when they had something to say.
A conference was proceeding in Heminway's office, he found when he arrived at the state's attorney's suite. Ellison was there and Heminway together with a couple of other assistants detailed upon the Considine case; and with them sat three plain-clothes detectives, one of whom—a man named Seifert—was in a swivel chair near the center of the room and plainly was the object of attention.
"Tell Mr. Clarke," bid Heminway to Seifert. "He's just tried Ketlar, you know."
Seifert, nodding, mouthed his much-chewed and unlit cigar.
"I bin out on Considine, Mr. Clarke. There's a break coming on Baretta—on 'count of the Considine bump-off. There's a 'skirt' who's rapping; but there's nothing doing on the Considine job yet. Nobody'll rap on that. But she's spieling on the Ketlar shooting now. 'Why don't this office get Baretta for that?' they say."
"What?" asked Calvin.
"'If we want Baretta, why don't we get him for killing Adele Ketlar?' they say," Seifert repeated; and Ellison, well knowing Clarke, interpreted.
"Seifert picked up a straight tip that George Baretta killed Ketlar's wife," he said.
"That is impossible," said Calvin.
"It's the fact, sir; I got it absolutely straight," Seifert returned, positively. "The Considine crowd knows and knew all along; George got mixed up with that Ketlar girl and killed her; and, if we handle it right, they'll come through with the stuff on him."