Parnell Hall - The Anonymous Client

The witness stared at him. “It most certainly would not.”

“It would not?”

“No.”

“The name Phyllis Kemper means nothing to you?”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Has no special significance?”

“None whatsoever.”

“And it is not true that last night when you were handed the clipboard, you reacted to seeing the name Phyllis Kemper?”

“No. It is not true.”

There was a pause.

Steve nodded. “You’re right, Miss Millburn. I don’t think that’s true either.”

The witness blinked. Stared at him.

Steve shook his head. “No. I think the name you reacted to was the name Mark Taylor.”

There was a pause. A time lag in the court, while people caught up with that statement. Mark Taylor? It was clear that most of the people in the court couldn’t even place the name.

Most of the people.

On the stand, the witness blinked. Once. Twice. She wet her lips.

“That’s true, isn’t it, Miss Millburn?” Steve said. “It was the name Mark Taylor that you reacted to, wasn’t it?”

“No. No,” she said. “It wasn’t.”

“No?” Steve said. He raised his voice and picked up the pace. “Then perhaps I can refresh your recollection. You have testified, have you not, that you never spoke to the decedent on the phone-that you never called him on his phone and he never called you on yours. Is that right?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Is it, Miss Millburn? I ask you, is it not a fact that on the afternoon of Tuesday the eighth, the man you knew as David C. Bradshaw called you on your telephone in your apartment, and said to you words to this effect: ‘I have just left the building and I’m being followed by detectives. I don’t want them to know I’ve spotted them. Here’s what I want you to do. I’m going to leave here and walk down the block in front of our building. I want you to look out your window at the car that’s tailing me and get the license number. Then I want you to call so-and-so at this phone number and ask him to trace the plate. Tell him it’s urgent and to do it right now. Just get the information, and I’ll call you right back.’

“And is it not a fact, Miss Millburn, that you did as you were instructed? Is it not a fact that you got the information, and when Bradshaw called you back minutes later, you passed it on to him? Is it not a fact that what you told Bradshaw, when he called you back from a pay phone on the corner, was that the car that was following him was registered to a detective agency? And wasn’t the name of the detective who had registered the car, the name that you passed on to David C. Bradshaw-wasn’t that name Mark Taylor? Isn’t that why the name Mark Taylor has a special significance to you, and isn’t that why you reacted so visibly to seeing his name on that list?”

The witness’s eyes darted around the courtroom. “No. No,” she said. “It’s not true.”

“It isn’t? You deny receiving either of those phone calls?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And if the records of the telephone company should show that calls were made from those pay phones to your apartment on the day in question, those records would be in error, is that right?”

“Objection. Argumentative.”

“Sustained.”

“Do you deny receiving those calls?” Steve persisted.

The witness hesitated. Looked around. “I … I…”

“It’s a simple question,” Steve said. “Do you or do you not deny receiving those calls?”

“It’s not a simple question,” she said. “You ask me if I deny receiving any calls from David C. Bradshaw. I may have received calls from someone else.”

Steve shook his head. “Nice try, Miss Millburn, but it’s no good. You forget. Bradshaw was being followed by detectives. Those detectives were in Mark Taylor’s employ and reported back to him. And those detectives reported the times and places of Bradshaw’s phone calls. If you received those calls, they could only have been from him.”

Margaret Millburn bit her lip.

Steve gave her time to think. He bored right in. “You see, Miss Millburn, it’s no use. We can prove you got those calls. Through the phone company, and the testimony of Mark Taylor’s men. If you want to try to deny what was said on those calls, that’s entirely up to you, but we can prove you got them all right. If we give you enough time, I’m sure you can come up with some plausible explanation for what was said during those calls, but you know and I know what was said, and it’s just what I told you. Bradshaw called you, told you he was being followed, and asked you to find who was doing it. Which you did.

“And if you did, it means you and Bradshaw were no casual strangers, as you would like to make it seem. You knew Bradshaw. You knew him well. You knew him before he even moved out here. When the apartment across the hall was about to be vacated, you called him and he snapped it up.

“Now, you’ve done a good job of keeping your relationship a secret. I happen to know that that was at his insistence, and I happen to know why.

“The fact is, you knew Bradshaw very well, you were in fact intimate with Bradshaw, and you’ve been in his apartment many times. Is that not a fact?”

“No. No, it’s not.”

“And is it not a fact that you knew all about the blackmail of Marilyn Harding? That you were in fact Bradshaw’s partner in the blackmail of Marilyn Harding?”

Margaret Millburn’s face was ashen white. “No. No, it’s not.”

“Oh isn’t it? I think it is. I’m going to tell you what happened, and then you can deny it if you like. You and Bradshaw were close. Damn close. You were his partner. You helped him out. Like tracing the license plate for him. You worked with him. You were a team.

“But no one knew it. Bradshaw insisted on that. Here he moved in across the hall from you and you thought everything would be hunky-dory. Except he didn’t want to be seen with you. He wanted your relationship to be a secret. You accepted it. You bought the reason he gave you-that if your relationship was known it would ruin some scam or other.

“But after a while that wore thin. You demanded to know the real reason. And after a while you found out why.

“He was two-timing you, wasn’t he? He had another woman on the side. And that wasn’t all. He was also cutting you out. He was two-timing you as a woman, and cutting you out as a partner. He was raking in money he wasn’t telling you about, and spending it on another woman. When you found out you were furious, and for good reason.”

Steve broke off the attack. He stood there looking at the witness for a moment. Then he shrugged his shoulders and said gently, “And that’s why you killed him.”

Margaret Millburn sat stunned. Steve’s casual, flat statement was harder to deal with than a shouted accusation would have been. Then she could have shouted her denial back. But what he’d said wasn’t even a question. It was just a simple statement of an assumed fact. She was like a batter expecting a fast ball and getting a change-up. Suddenly off-stride, she had to supply all the power, put all the force into her denial. “No!” she said. “I didn’t!”

Steve immediately jumped back on the attack. “Yes, you did, and I can prove it. I’ll tell you how you did it.

“You knew he was shaking down Marilyn Harding. That was one of the things you managed to find out, but you didn’t know for how much. But you knew she was calling on him. And you knew she was being followed by detectives-Bradshaw had spotted them when she came to his apartment, and he’d told you that much, probably as another reason why you shouldn’t be seen with him. So you knew Bradshaw had the goods on her, and you knew he was still shaking her down, and so you waited for your chance.