The Glass Village (20 page)

“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.”