The Valentino Affair (40 page)

Uterhart objected on grounds that
no one
had ever heard of Captain William Jones before the case. Because Jones was the NYPD’s foremost firearms expert, and because it was his testimony that had featured so prominently in the sensational and highly publicized campaign to free convicted killer Charles Stielow from death row that same year, this was quite a slur. Justice Manning told Uterhart to sit down and Amalia continued. After more exchanges about the gun, Weeks moved on to Jack Jr.’s comments about his father’s girlfriends.

“When did you hear him discuss his father’s sweethearts . . . ? What year was that?”

“I think it was 1917.”

“Was that not after he had obtained a divorce?”

“I think so.”

“What did you ever hear little Jack say about these sweethearts?”

“He spoke of them as his sweethearts as well as his daddy’s.”

When Uterhart objected, Weeks was ready for him. “The defense opened the door, and I am going to walk through it.”
¹⁸
The judge agreed. Amalia said that whenever little Jack came back from visits to his father’s, bubbling with tales of his sweethearts, it greatly upset Blanca.

“Did the boy act as if he were very fond of Boobie?” asked Weeks.

“Yes, in the evening, but not in the morning before he left.”
¹⁹

Weeks was clearly suspicious about Amalia’s clarity of recall. He asked how old she had been when Blanca fell and hit her head.

“Twelve years old.”

“What was your sister’s age at that time?”

“Eight years.”

“And you remember all of this now at twenty-seven?”

“Yes,”
²⁰
she answered defiantly. With an incredulous expression Weeks said he had no more questions. As hard as the district attorney had tried, he had failed to unsettle Amalia, who was clearly cut from the same resilient cloth as her sister.

On redirect, Uterhart brought out that the witness’s mother, who had not missed a court session until the preceding afternoon, had fallen very ill and that Dr. Wight had been in attendance upon her all night. Amalia feared that she might not testify. A disappointed groan greeted this announcement. The prospect of the haughty señora dueling with the district attorney had been one of the anticipated highlights of the trial and now that expectation had been put on hold. Some wondered if the disgruntled matriarch, drawing on King Lear’s observation, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child,” had decided to teach her perfidious daughter a lesson.

Things moved briskly along, with Uterhart next calling Suzanne Monteau. The maid was “not the good witness she promised to be.”
²¹
Her heavy accent, faltering English, and terrified demeanor made it difficult for the jury to understand her as she described Blanca’s actions on the night in question. “She tell me she like me to go with her to fetch the boy. So I go to wash my hands to go with her. She told the taxi man a short way to go quicker and to drive fast. When we went to the house we saw car there and she said, ‘Mr. De Saulles must be in.’ She asked Julius where was Mr. De Saulles, and he said in the living room.”
²²
After a long pause for breath, Suzanne said, “When Mrs. De Saulles went into living room a man in gray suit went upstairs.”
²³

The pubic gallery stirred. This could only have been Marshall Ward, whom the defense always maintained had not actually witnessed the shooting. For the second time in this trial the jury heard testimony that branded the dead man’s business partner as a blatant perjurer. In her tentative way Suzanne continued: “I saw Mr. De Saulles’s face—awful face he make at her.”
²⁴
She broke off for a moment and then sobbed, “Oh, it was terrible, terrible.”
²⁵
“Mrs. De Saulles said, ‘My boy—I have come for him,’ and he say, ‘You can’t have him now or ever.’ . . . Mrs. De Saulles’s face turn [
sic
] ever so white.”

At this point Suzanne had to stop, her mouth opening and closing several times without any sound emerging. She burst into tears. When she had become a little more composed, Justice Manning asked her gently, “Then what happened?”
²⁶

Eventually she said, “She shooted him. [
sic
] He turned and she fired and he turned and she fired again. She fired three times while he was facing her, then he turned and she fired again twice.”
²⁷

Justice Manning was puzzled. “You say he was facing her?”

“Yes, he was right in front.”
²⁸
Suzanne’s loyalty might have been commendable but her testimony was directly contradicted by the autopsy findings. As a result, her evidence now came under even closer scrutiny.

After the shooting, said the witness, she and Blanca had retreated to the porch, where the valet approached them. “Julius talked to her, but she did not answer. I heard a woman say, ‘Oh, Blanquita, what have you done?’ but she didn’t answer.”
²⁹
Later, as they were leaving the scene, Blanca had asked Donner to take the dog back to Crossways, where he would be paid for his work. Then they drove off. Uterhart interjected, “Did she say on the way over to the jail, ‘I hope he dies’?”

“She didn’t. I swear she didn’t say it.”
³⁰

Suzanne then moved on to events when they reached the town hall office of Judge Jones. Mrs. De Saulles asked if he could get the boy for her. He told her that this would not be possible.

“When she left Judge Jones’s office how did she go out?” asked Uterhart.

“She went as if she were going to walk out of the window.”
³¹

“What did she do when she came to the jail?”

“She was walking with her hands in her pockets, looking up and down, laughing like mad.”
³²
The last two words were ordered struck out, a decision that caused Suzanne to dissolve in a flood of tears. Uterhart had succeeded in his mission, though, to demonstrate that Blanca had been so disoriented as to be unaware of her surroundings.

Nothing in the trial more vividly demonstrated the brutal social divide of the times than Suzanne Monteau’s cross-examination. Weeks “attacked the witness with all the fury of a tornado,”
³³
determined not to be “as sparing with her as he had been with her mistress.”
³⁴
There was something deeply unpleasant, cowardly almost, about the way Weeks was prepared to browbeat a lowly maidservant, in stark contrast to the cringing deference he had displayed the previous day when cross-examining her upper-class employer. He began by giving Suzanne a contemptuous look. “Are you afraid of testifying here?”

“No, sir.”

“Then what are you crying for?”

“I object,” shouted Uterhart. “It is a very rude and insulting question. Any woman is likely to cry in such an ordeal.”

“Well, another one didn’t.”

“Some women cannot cry,”
³⁵
Uterhart fired back.

“Perhaps so. Some who did not see it sat and wept,”
³⁶
sneered Weeks, a clear and pointed reference to Uterhart’s constant flow of tears during Blanca’s testimony.

“Quite right,” shouted the big defender. “And some who claim they saw the tragedy did not weep.”
³⁷
This was yet another barb aimed squarely at Marshall Ward, who by now had become the defense’s chief whipping boy.

After this spat, Weeks turned to face the witness. “Do you say that Mr. De Saulles stood three feet away from his wife, looking at her, and did nothing when she took out the revolver?”

“Yes, he looked as if he were going to jump at her.”

“Did he make any motion as if to reach his wife?”

“Yes, he went like this.” Suzanne raised her arm as de Saulles might have done if he intended to strike the revolver aside.

“As if to strike her?”

“Yes.”

“And you say that because the doctors have said the bullets entered the back of his arm?”

“I don’t care what the doctors say.”
³⁸

Weeks’s bludgeoning interrogation continued. It was far from pretty, but highly effective as Suzanne slowly disintegrated under the DA’s remorseless attack. He read from her contradictory testimony at the coroner’s hearing, where she said that Jack did not move or do anything at all when his wife pointed the revolver at him. “Did you say that?”
³⁹
Suzanne agreed that she did. She also admitted that neither Blanca nor herself made any attempt to get the boy, although they both saw Jack Jr. with Caroline on the stairs when they entered the house. “Why did you go into the living room?”

“Because I heard the way Mr. De Saulles spoke to her.”

“And you went in to protect your mistress?”

“Yes.”

“But she protected herself, didn’t she?”

There was no answer from the maid, but Uterhart, from the counsel’s table, broke in: “Yes, she did.”
⁴⁰

Weeks, turning a deaf ear to the interruption, asked Suzanne if she remembered his visiting the jail the day after the shooting.

“I do not remember it at all.”
⁴¹

How about the transaction that resulted in her being freed on bail, with Blanca arranging the bail?

“I don’t recall it.”

“Don’t you know that Mrs. De Saulles signed a check for $1,000 and obtained your release?”

“I don’t remember.”
⁴²

The numbing frequency of these memory lapses led some in the press box to wonder if the maid was not taking a leaf out of the mistress’s book. And there were also grave misgivings about the selective nature of Suzanne Monteau’s amnesia. Any scrap of information or incident that might be harmful to her employer was brushed into the “I don’t recall” category. On the other hand, those events favorable to Blanca seemed always to kick start her memory back into life. Eventually the young Frenchwoman was put out of her misery and released. She scurried, squirrel-like, from the stand. One headline the next day caught the general mood in court, declaring that the maid had been a “POOR
WITNESS
FOR
THE
DEFENSE
.”
⁴³

During his opening, Uterhart claimed that a string of physical ailments, most involving head trauma, had caused a mental instability in Blanca de Saulles that led not only to the shooting but also the amnesia that followed, or as some wags were now calling it, “dementia materna,”
⁴⁴
in joking reference to the Thaw trial. It was now time to produce the medical evidence to back up that claim.

The first expert witness was Dr. J. Sherman Wight, visiting surgeon at the Long Island College Hospital. He told the court how, on August 6, in company with Dr. Johnson and Dr. Cleghorn, he examined the prisoner and found her listless and vague. “I asked her to put her tongue out and at first she didn’t. I turned her face to me and I repeated the request, and then she did, and I noticed that the tongue was swollen. . . . Her skin was cold and dry. Her nails were brittle and cracked and her hair was dry and brittle. On the backs of her hands were swellings, her feet were swollen, and her limbs showed elevations of the surface.”
⁴⁵
Her vital signs—blood pressure, temperature, and pulse—were all well below normal and when she tried to move her breathing became labored. “When I touched her abdomen and face she shrank away, and when I touched her head and found a sensitive area, it caused her to shrink away and utter a cry.”
⁴⁶
Further examination led him to conclude that Blanca was suffering from an underactive thyroid. He immediately prescribed a course of thyroid extract.

When Wight reexamined Blanca the next day, he found a concave hollow in the skull—an inch and a half long and three eighths of an inch deep—above the forehead and just behind the scalp hairline. This, he told the jury, was a depressed fracture, most likely the result of Blanca’s falling against an andiron when she was a girl. He thought that the bone had been broken a second time during her automobile accident two years previously. Because this problem had never been operated on, if one’s finger was pressed on this spot now it caused pain.