Erle Gardner - Beware the Curves

“And what did you do?” Quinn asked, his manner showing his complete surprise at what was happening.

Here was a witness who should have been hysterical, who should have been in tears, who should have been reluctantly making damaging admissions, and she was sitting on the witness stand, cool, calm and collected, answering his questions without the slightest embarrassment. Here was the district attorney, who should have been bordering on panic as he saw his carefully constructed case being shattered to smithereens, and Irvine was standing cool, suave and sardonic, his manner that of one who is patiently putting up with tactics of a minor pettifogging nature simply because he doesn’t want to waste the time of the Court with objections.

A deputy sheriff tiptoed along the aisle of the courtroom and put a folded piece of paper into my hand. It was a message from our expert in Pasadena. It stated that he had been served with a subpoena duces tecum to appear and bring the gun with him into court.

I knew then we were sunk. I frantically tried to catch Quinn’s eye before he asked the one last fatal question.

“What did you do after that?”

She said, “I left the house and left the gun lying there on the bureau in the bedroom.”

“Who was in the bedroom?”

“The decedent, Karl Endicott.”

“And where was the defendant?”

“In the adjoining den.”

Quinn said, “That’s all,” and sat down. He was like a man who had hurled his weight against a door to smash it open, and found the door unlocked and unlatched.

District Attorney Irvine smiled benignly. “That is all, Miss Manning. And thank you very much for your frank statement of the facts.”

The witness started to leave the stand.

“Oh, just a moment,” Irvine said. “I have one question, and only one question, Miss Manning. Did you make a statement of what you have just testified to the defense in this case?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Last night.”

“To whom was that statement made?”

“To two detectives employed by the defendant, Donald Lam and Bertha Cool.”

“Thank you, thank you. That is all,” Irvine said.

The witness left the stand.

Irvine said, “Now Your Honor, in view of the testimony of this witness, it becomes necessary for me to call one more witness.”

He called our expert from Pasadena.

The expert identified the gun as having been received from us. He had, he admitted, cleaned up the gun so that he could fire a test bullet through it. He had not had access to the fatal bullet, and, therefore, he could not state whether that was the gun from which the fatal bullet had been fired.

“If you are given an opportunity to consult with the prosecution’s expert and an opportunity to examine the fatal bullet, do you feel that you can reach such a conclusion?” Irvine asked.

The expert said he thought he could.

The smiling Irvine suggested that the witness leave the stand and be given an opportunity to make such an examination, that Steven Beardsley, the ballistics expert for the prosecution, would be only too glad to cooperate in every way with an expert of such renowned professional standing.

And then Irvine asked to recall Cooper Hale to the stand briefly. That did it.

Cooper Hale testified that, after hearing the shot, he had dashed upstairs, that he had found Endicott lying dead on the floor, that there was a bullet hole in the back of his head, that there was no gun on the bureau in the room.

“Now then,” Irvine said, “let me ask you a few questions about more recent events, Mr. Hale. Where do you live at the present time?”

Hale gave him his address.

“And where is that with reference to the estate known as the Whippoorwill, the estate of Karl Carver Endicott, deceased?”

“It is next door.”

“In the adjoining house?”

“Yes.”

“Directing your attention to the night before the commencement of this trial, did you notice anything unusual taking place at that time in the Endicott residence?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What?”

“Two persons were digging something up in a hedge of the Endicott home.”

“Did you have an opportunity to see those persons or recognize them?”

“Yes. I recognized them by their voices.”

“Will you tell us what happened?”

“My house was dark. I had retired. It was well after midnight. I saw the two individuals vaguely out in the hedge. I was curious, so I put on a dark robe and slipped out a side door. I learned from their low-voiced conversation that they were digging something up.”

“And then what happened?”

“I heard one of them say, ‘I found it!’ “

“Do you know who that person was?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Who?”

“Donald Lam, a detective employed by the defense.”

“Had you heard his voice before?”

“Yes.”

“You recognized that voice?”

“I did.”

“Now then, prior to that time had you seen anyone burying anything near the location of the hedge?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Endicott.”

“You mean Elizabeth Endicott, the widow of Karl Carver Endicott?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What had you seen her burying?”

“I don’t know what it was. It was something she took from a package. She dug a little hole in the ground, and placed this thing, whatever it was, in that hole, and covered it loosely with earth.”

“When was that?”

“It was that same night.”

“What time?”

“About an hour before Mr. Lam and Mrs. Cool dug up the gun.”

“Did you hear them refer to it as a gun?”

“Yes.”

“Now with reference to the place you saw this thing being buried, where was that? At what particular spot in the hedge? Can you point it out on the map?”

The witness pointed to a spot on the map.

“Now mark that with an ‘X’ and put your initials near it.”

The witness did so.

“With reference to the place where you saw this gun being dug up, or rather where you heard the persons at work digging up the weapon, can you identify that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where was it?”

“At exactly the same place, as nearly as I can tell,” the witness said.

Irvine turned to Quinn with a smile. “Cross-examine,” he said.

Fortunately at that point Quinn had sense enough to direct the Court’s attention to the fact that it was time for the midmorning recess.

The Court took its recess and Quinn came over to me.

“It’s all right,” I told him. “We’re going to outsmart them yet.”

“But what the hell happened?”

“What happened,” I said, “is perfectly obvious. That damn district attorney, with his romantic bearing, his expressive eyes, has completely hypnotized Helen Manning. She’s eating out of his hand. He’s convinced her that he’s her dish. She must have telephoned him as soon as we left her apartment and told him what had happened.

“There wasn’t, of course, any way that we could have prevented that. If we’d been the prosecution, we could have taken her into custody so she couldn’t have communicated with the other side.

“So the district attorney gets hold of Hale and tells him the sad news and Hale laughs, says he was just waiting for us to walk into that trap and tells the prosecutor for the first time about having seen Mrs. Endicott burying something in the hedge and about seeing us digging something up.”

“Do you think Irvine would let him do that without asking him why he hadn’t told his story before?”

“He asked all right, and Hale undoubtedly explained that he thought the authorities had the murder weapon, that he didn’t know exactly what we had found and that he was waiting to see what sort of a frame-up we were cooking up before showing his hand.”