Корнелл Вулрич - Manhattan Love Song

After a minute’s hiatus, the case went grinding ponderously on without her. Westman called another name, one that I didn’t recognize, and an unknown took the stand. The seemingly interminable succession of ebony witnesses had finally come to an end with him. Which was something. But even Leroy’s sartorial splendor paled to nothingness compared to what was now on display. His clothes fitted as though they had been poured over him hot and allowed to harden. And he had a gardenia in his coat. Or maybe it was only a white carnation.

“Do you recognize this defendant?” said Westman ominously.

“I do,” he said readily. “Like hell you do,” I growled to myself, “when’d I ever see you before?”

“Tell the court your story,” Westman ordered.

The new witness took hold of one cuff, and then the other, and meticulously pulled them down an inch below the sleeve of his coat. “The Saturday before I read about this murder,” he announced in a clear, ringing voice that carried all the way to the end of the room and back with a lot left over, “I was coming out of the Cort Theater, where I worked at the time, and this man was standing at the stage entrance.” Then all at once I remembered who he was. “Well, for the love of Mike!” I thought with a gasp, “is that going to be brought up too?” It wouldn’t have surprised me any more to see my old teacher from school come parading in to tell all about how I had broken a window with an eraser in 8-B.

The stage-trained voice went on and on without even a moment’s loss for a word, without even an “er” or an “um.” For the First time since the trial had begun, I found myself a little uncomfortable, embarrassed, wishing I didn’t have to sit there in the room. For all I knew, he might have every intention of telling why he had taken me up to the flat in the first place. But he had that part nicely under control, it soon appeared. “—when we got to where I lived, I found out that my friend the stage manager hadn’t waited, he may have had a headache or something that evening, but the thing is he hadn’t waited, he’d gone home. So I turned to this man and told him that I thought the best thing for him to do would be to call around at the theater the following Monday, a little earlier if possible to make sure my friend hadn’t gone home yet, and then borrow the hundred dollars — never knowing what type person he was!” And he paused dramatically, with a neat little spread of the hands, to let my awful double-facedness sink in upon his listeners. “Before I quite realized what was happening,” he went on, “he had forced his way in, struck me in the face so that I was simply covered with blood and nearly lost consciousness, and robbed me of the hundred dollars. Me!” he repeated with orchidaceous indignation, indicating his cravat, “who had tried to do him a good turn!” And flashing me a sulky look, as much as to say, “Now look what you got!” he turned his profile the other way.

I couldn’t help noticing that the atmosphere in the courtroom, particularly on the part of the spectators, wasn’t nearly as sympathetic as it might have been, considering the amount of effort and dramatic suspense he had put into his recital. But it was reverence itself compared to what was brought on later, when Berenson had taken him over.

He began by asking him: “Did you report this incident to the police at the time it happened, Mr. Saint-Clair?”

“ Sin clair. It’s pronounced as if it were spelt s-i-n. I told Mr. Westman that.”

Berenson roared, “I didn’t ask you how you say your name! I asked you if you reported this alleged robbery to the police at the time!”

“No,” replied the witness heatedly, “and you don’t have to yell at me like that, either!”

When the gale of merriment had subsided and he could make himself audible once more, Berenson demanded, “Why not? Why didn’t you?”

“For reasons of my own.”

“Will you kindly tell the court what they are?” Berenson insisted.

“Because I was afraid it might hurt me professionally,” Mr. Sinclair answered unwillingly. I could tell, even from where I was, that he was a little less at ease than he had been up to now.

“But you claim you were the one who was robbed,” Berenson said dulcetly. “How could that hurt you professionally or otherwise?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” the witness answered peevishly. “I just had an idea that it might, that was all!”

I was almost expecting Berenson to wind up by getting him to admit he was the one who had done the robbing, before he was through.

“And yet you’re willing enough to come here today and tell your story to the court, irrelevant as it may be. How is that, Mr. Sinclair?”

“I’m not working now,” he said lamely. “I was then.”

“Well, I don’t pretend to understand the ethics of the theatrical profession,” Berenson remarked stingingly. “We’ll let that part of it go. Where did you have this money, this hundred and fifteen dollars you say the defendant stole from you?”

“In my apartment.”

“We already know that, Mr. Sinclair,” Berenson said patiently. “Just whereabouts was it? Under the rug?”

There was a preliminary titter or two from the back, but I, who already knew the answer that Berenson was bound to get if he kept on insisting, held on to the chair I was on.

The Sinclair gentleman suddenly lost the little temper that remained to him and blurted out vindictively, “In the bathroom, behind the toilet paper! Now are you satisfied?”

The judge had to threaten to have the room cleared no less than three times before the ribald outbursts this had brought on were effectively stemmed. It took nearly three minutes, I should judge. And by that time, the hunted yet venomous look on Mr. Sinclair’s face would have drawn pity from any one but a courtroom audience.

When he was released from the stand (Berenson told me later that he cut such a ridiculous figure, he had benefited rather than harmed us), he made his way to the back of the room with a rapidity that almost resembled flight, and disappeared through the big frosted-glass doors to the accompaniment of a playful hiss from some young woman or other seated back there.

I thought he had come back again, possibly to avenge himself on her or on all of us, a moment later when I saw everyone’s head turning that way, from the jury to the very court attendants, and heard a commotion at the door. People began to stand up in their seats here and there to look over the heads of others, and the judge’s gavel had no effect for a moment or two. Westman hurriedly quit his place before the witness-box and disappeared toward the back of the room, and when a line of vision had been cleared, I saw him standing before a woman whose entire face was wound with bandages so that not even the eyes showed through, supported on either side by a colored man and woman as though she could hardly stand up.

She was taken out of the room again as soon as he had finished speaking to her two attendants, for it was evident that she herself couldn’t talk, and after he had conferred with the judge, the latter rapped and announced that court was adjourned until the following day owing to the incapacitation of one of the principal witnesses for the state, Tenacity Lowell.

The way Berenson came to me when I had been escorted back, you would have thought his own life was at stake and not mine. “They threw acid at her,” he gasped despondently, “right in the doorway of her own flat! She’s lost an eye, and the whole lower part of her face’s been eaten away — can’t talk even if she wanted to.” He gave me a searching look. “It’s not going to be easy now, Wade.”