The Glass Village (18 page)

“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—