Корнелл Вулрич - Manhattan Love Song

Among those called on as witnesses was Leroy, Bernice’s Harvard-accent doorman. His last name was Devereaux, I found out. He came to court without his uniform and wearing a fuzzy caramel-colored suit with patch pockets and a half belt in back that would have driven any college freshman insane with longing. With this went beige spats, four inches of brown-silk handkerchief hanging out of his breast pocket, and, I am almost positive, a walking stick hanging up somewhere in the courthouse checkroom.

He sat up there at elegant ease, and no man in the room could match his English. It was really as delightful as it was instructive to listen to him speak, but I noticed the judge had to turn his head away several times during the course of the cross-questioning.

Leroy told how I had appeared about nine in Bernice’s lobby, passed a grip I was carrying to him, and then insisted I had just had a message from him on her behalf to come up there, which he again flatly denied having sent me, just as he had that night. This point held them up for fully half an hour, and only the liquidity of Leroy’s vowels kept me from returning to look out of the window again in spite of Berenson’s admonition. When they had finally decided that it was the relief man who had sent the message (and I saw Berenson give me a triumphant look, but what about I couldn’t imagine), Leroy was allowed to go ahead. He told them he had asked me if I wanted to be announced, whereupon (the “whereupon” was his own, too) I had given him an odd look and remarked: “Miss Pascal expects me more than she ever expected any one in her life.” At which point I heard a buzz of excitement rise from the onlookers at the back of the room. The judge struck the desk with his mallet, and when they had grown quiet again. Westman, the prosecuting attorney, asked Leroy to describe the look he said I had given him.

“It was a, I should say a sinister look,” Leroy said.

I had never known just how to pronounce that word until I heard him use it.

“Explain what you mean,” Westman said.

“It was the look of a man who is dangerous, who is capable of almost anything. Well, there’s no other word for it, it was a sinister look, that was all,” Leroy informed him dogmatically.

I felt like jumping up then and there and protesting that it couldn’t have been that kind of a look because I hadn’t known how to pronounce the word at the time.

“Has the defendant that look on him now?” Westman went on.

Leroy turned to look at me, and I certainly had, even if I’d never had it before; I was glaring at him with all my might. “Thoroughly,” he said, turning away again in a hurry.

From there he went on to say that he had next seen me at about quarter to ten, and had been very much taken aback, because I was going in again like the time before, and he hadn’t seen me come out at all. And that I had told him to get the police, I would be up in Bernice’s apartment.

When Berenson took him over, he asked him a few desultory questions first, and then suddenly skipped all the intermediate evidence to inquire with beguiling deference what his, Leroy’s, theory was as to how I had managed to leave the building without being seen either by himself or the elevator operator. I couldn’t figure out why he was asking that at this late day. The whole town, or anyway as large a part of it as was following the case, knew by this time I had come down the emergency staircase when neither of them were looking. That had been in the confession I had signed.

Leroy smiled tolerantly and said, “We all know how he accomplished that—” and repeated what I had done.

“In that case,” Berenson said quickly, “would it have been equally possible for any one else to have used the same staircase that evening — and not be seen by you or any one in the lobby?”

“I don’t see why not,” Leroy replied haughtily. “I’m kept quite busy before the house procuring cars. Especially around dinnertime. And after all, I don’t expect people to slink—”

“Answer yes or no!” Berenson snapped. “Would it have been equally possible for any one else to have come down those stairs that night and left the building without being seen by you?”

“Yes,” Leroy answered sulkily. I suppose he didn’t like to be confined to one-syllable words because there wasn’t as much opportunity to pronounce them beautifully.

“That’s all,” Berenson said. Leroy uncoiled himself, stood up so that every one would have a fair chance to admire and profit by his attire, and left the stand walking on air. Some rude damsel in back tittered.

Berenson called someone I’d never seen before in his place. Also colored. I began to wonder if Bernice and I were the only white people involved in this case. This one, it soon turned out, was the reliefman. He had been on duty, he said, from seven until nine that evening. He had not telephoned any message to me from Bernice. He had not telephoned any message to anybody from Bernice. He had not telephoned any message to anybody from anybody. Every dwelling in the building had its own private phone; the only calls he had received were incoming ones, there had only been two of those, and one had been a wrong number and the other a lady who wished to have her husband informed, when he got home, that he was to come right out again and meet her at Tony’s, Jimmy was there. “Your witness,” Berenson said after a sufficient amount of this.

I now understood his triumphant look to me awhile back, when Leroy had been on the stand, and the phone message I had gotten had been credited to the relief man. But I still didn’t understand what he had to be, feel, or look triumphant about. After all, even if the message was proven to be fake (and I was beginning to think it was myself, because the relief man’s voice didn’t even approach the Octavus-Roy-Cohen dialect that had greeted my ears over the wire), that didn’t prove that I hadn’t gone up there and done it myself anyway. It merely suggested feebly, if one were inclined to be prejudiced in my favor, that I had been framed by some person or persons unknown. And on the other hand, there was only my word for it that there had been any such message at all. Only Maxine and I had been there when the phone rang; what chance had Berenson of proving it to the jury?

I noticed that Westman himself considered this point so immaterial to the evidence that he didn’t even try very hard to shake the relief man’s insistence on not having sent the call, just let him go after a question or two. When the case was adjourned for that day, Berenson came up to me almost exuberantly, he seemed so pleased with the way things had gone, and giving my biceps a furtive, encouraging grip, breathed, “Wait’ll to-morrow, kid! It’s going to start getting rosy from now on. They’re calling Tenacity!”

I had a peculiar dream that night in the cell of a sort of black Bernice, whom I was very much in love with, but the color of whose skin kept rubbing off on my clothes every time I went near her. And each time it did, she sort of cried out in pain, so that my heart was wrung.

Next day, about halfway through the morning’s session, the famous Tenacity’s name was at last called. “Tenacity Lowell! Take the stand, please.” They waited; no sign of her. They called her a second time, louder than before. I turned to look. The people in the back of the room were twisting their heads this way and that, but no one came forward. All the faces but one were unmistakably Caucasian — and that one belonged to the unforgetable Leroy, who was present again. She wasn’t to have been a witness for the defense, far from it, but when it came down to it, Berenson’s face showed more disappointment and worry than the prosecuting attorney’s by far, I thought.