The Case of the Lavender Gripsack

by Harry Stephen Keeler

“Yes,” said Elsa Colby firmly, “he has a witness! And since the State has now rested its case, I wish that witness to be called . The witness is in this room—and his name is John Doe. Mr. Doe—please take the stand!”

  CHAPTER XI

  Calling “John Doe”!

  A tense silence filled the entire improvised courtroom at Elsa Colby’s words. She realized, with some misgivings, what a small, unprepossessing figure she was, standing there coolly telling Louis Vann, veteran of a hundred trials—and this Judge of the Criminal Bench—“what was what”! In her bosom crinkled the pencil-written communication which her reddish-haired client, now seated behind her, had passed to her during the entrance of the final witnesses—which she had observed him rapidly writing out on one of the wide flat arms of his chair, using a sheet of paper and pencil given him surli­ly by Mullins. Its words—all of them—seemed clearly etched in her mind:

  “Don’t forget you agreed in my cell late today that you’d put ME on the stand! So I’m holding you to that. Certainly I’ve got a right to deny that I broke into the D. A.’s safe, and killed that night watchman, and to take the D. A.’s withering cross-examination—if I wish. It’s my life that’s at stake, don’t forget. And now about this gang of witnesses that’s been trooping in here by ones and twos and threes. You can cross-examine ’em or not, as you wish. But if, as you told me you’d heard, Judge Penworth is the type of judge who will be prejudiced at your badgering a witness with a straight clear story, better not. After all, I banked everything on taking trial before him because I’d heard of this ‘ultra-legal’ mind, and so I can’t afford to get the Bench down on me. And besides, the testimony of that gang—if it’s to do with the safe job, and the night watchman murder, and all that, has nothing to do with me anyway. So please don’t forget! Put me on. For if you don’t, I’ll simply have to rise to my feet—and raise billy-hell to the effect that my own lawyer is giving me a run-around. So let’s not show the State we’re at odds.

  “P.S.: You’re sure pretty scrumptious-looking in that creation you’ve got on! It matches your hair—and makes you look exactly like a little flaming late autumn leaf in a big forest defying Old Man Winter to come and do his worst. Of course me, I like best that little grey mouse that slithered into my cell today.

  “P.P.S.: Getting back to serious matters, don’t cross-examine that peculiar-looking buzzard with the black string-tie and the black cotton umbrella across his thin knees. For if you do, again I say I’ll have to rise up in court and yell that my own attorney’s double-crossing my wishes. For that old bird is dynamite—never have I seen an eye as cold as his. And his mugg, at least to me, says that he’s such as would swear himself clear into hell providing he left himself some kind of a safe ‘out’—but if crossed, publicly, or tricked, he’d mali­ciously add to whatever he was doing. So my hunch is lay off that baby completely—and I always follow hunches, if I get ’em, instead of reason!”

  But Judge Penworth was speaking.

  “Of course, Miss Colby, every defendant who takes the stand becomes, technically, a witness for himself. Though often indeed he becomes—I want to warn you—a witness for the State. Yes, indeed, Miss Colby. But as to your implied scornful criticism of the State’s natural inference, even I can only say that it was a natural presumption of Bench and Prosecutor that the defendant, being caught red-handed with the evidence of a certain crime on his person, and even ac­knowledging that—but let that pass. It was a natural pre­sump­tion on the State’s part that you would only be offering, in your final address, arguments to the Court to mitigate its ruling.”

  Penworth turned to the prisoner, who had sat silent, the long length of chain connecting the handcuff on his wrist to that of the blue-clad officer seated on the low tabourette in front of him, giving an occasional slight clink as the pris­oner’s wrist moved uneasily. “You wish to take the stand, do you, Doe? Let me inform you that you are not compelled to take it—even if your own attorney calls you.”

  “Of course I want to take the stand, Judge Penw—that is, Your Honor,” the defendant said. “And if you’re suggesting that I’m dissatisfied with this little girl, I’m not. As an attorney she’s—she’s quite all right. Certainly there’s been no reason why she should have badgered all these well-meaning people here, when they sat in the chair, for they doubtlessly know what they were testifying to. Certainly I couldn’t—or wouldn’t—have handled my case any different than she has. But the point is that since they’ve told all they have—it’s my turn now to tell what I have to tell.”

  “Well, that is quite certainly your right,” agreed Penworth judicially. “And which most certainly I’m not denying you. Your attorney knows, I take it, the evidence you expect to offer?”

  “No, Your Honor.”

  “No?” Penworth appeared dumbfounded. “Why—how is that?”

  “Because I didn’t know when she first descended on me today—didn’t know, in fact, till she was named here in court—but that she was out of the District Attorney’s office, and—and trying to catch my hand. So I wouldn’t tell her a da—that is, anything.”

  Penworth turned to Elsa Colby.

  “Is this so, Miss Colby?”

  “Yes, Your Honor. I know my client has his side of—of the story. Because he implied that much when he told me today he was his own star witness. Though his only witness like­wise—I concede. But all that is why I’ve called him now—blindly, if you want to take it that way.”

  Judge Penworth stroked his small white goatee studiedly.

  “Then,” he queried, “it wont be a matter of your putting certain questions to him—and his giving you—rather the Court—the answers?”

  “Hardly,” retorted Elsa Colby dryly, “in view of his past reticence as to what his testimony would consist of. However, he has expressed a wish—rather, a demand—to set forth his own facts and statements—which I now officially demand for him—and the Court or Mr. Vann may then do with them as—as they wish.”

  “Take the stand here then, Doe,” Penworth ordered curtly.

  The defendant had already risen. “Gladly, Your Honor. But—but what about—this—” And he held up the lengthy chain which bound him to the immobile seated police officer.

  Penworth gazed judiciously about him—at the three curtained big windows near to where the defendant had been sitting—then back of himself at the high window in the rear of Mullins—and then at the witness chair at his own side, in a corner of the room where there was not a window. Though there was, to be sure, along that wall closest to that chair, a door.

  He spoke, in the direction of the defendant’s guard. “Officer Mullarky, will you bring your stool and yourself to the side of the witness chair? There’s ample chain there for you to sit next to the witness while he testifies. “Inspector Scott, I wonder if I might ask you, please, to turn the key in that door there—yes—and keep charge of it? I’ve known defendants in two cases to go quite loco and attem—”

  But he did not finish what he was saying. For Scott seem­ingly did it for him, by rising, turning the key in question, and pocketing it.

  And, in the meantime, amidst some clanking and maneu­vering, on the part of the blue-uniformed guard, of the chain and the stool, the man Doe was rounding the attorney’s table, and climbing up into that slightly raised chair. Vann sat, turned slightly toward the chair, an ironic smile on his lips. Leo Kilgallon, his assistant, had on his face a most sceptical look.

  Mullins rose.

  “Raise your right hand, John Doe,” he called to the prisoner. “Do you solemnly swear—”

  “Cut it!” bit out the defendant scornfully. “I’m an atheist—and I thank God for it!”

  A laugh arose, around and about the room, particularly among the newspapermen. All grew quiet again.

  “Denote the defendant’s testimony, Miss Swarthmar,” Penworth was saying, with a sigh, “as attested testimony
.”

  Elsa arose. “John,” she said, amidst almost suffocating silence, “I’ve put you on the stand because it was your wish—as well as your right. You’ve given me quite nothing to go on tonight but that you were star witness for yourself. You refused to let me summon other witnesses—any witnesses. And so I now ask you to give your story. I must only warn you that unless by that story you can account for why you had on your person the skull of Wah L—rather, let me put it more broadly—why you were found under all the circumstances in which you were found—and why you stated to certain persons what you did—and last, but not least, how you obtained inside facts by which you were enabled to make such statements—well, unless, John, your story will account for all these things, you had better climb down and let me do certain things I have in mind. In my final address, that is.”

  “Thanks a lot, Elsa,” he said. “I can see now—” He turned undecidedly to Penworth. “I call her Elsa,” he explained naïvely, “because she’s my attorney.” He gazed about the room, then at the big clock just over his own right shoulder, and then at the Judge again. “How long, Your Honor, have I—under the law—to give my testimony?”

  “Well—you’re not particularly limited,” retorted Pen­worth. “But why do you ask?”

  “Because,” the defendant explained, “I want to give all the facts of what my attorney tells I must give. From the very point where they began, and on up to where they ended. And the full conversations, as nearly as I can recollect them, of the several individuals who figure directly in my story. Indi­viduals whose full names I will give, and addresses. No—Your Honor, it won’t be possible to ring up the people whose names I will give, and get them down here while I’m giving the facts, for the very simple reason that they—but that’s getting too far ahead of things. For—but, anyway, my story may take as much as thirty minutes—it might even stretch out to a full hour. And I don’t want to be shut off midway.”

  “You won’t be shut off,” grunted Judge Penworth, “at least as long as my aspirin lasts! I told you once already it’s neither the State’s intention—nor the Court’s, either—to have this trial fail because of the mere pure technicality that the one lone witness for a man’s life was not allowed to give his full testimony.” He turned to the State’s Attorney. “Is that not so, Mr. Vann?”

  “Very much so, Your Honor!” agreed that individual. “We—the State—don’t intend to retry this case.” He turned to the defendant in the chair. “Play your piece, Doe. To its last note!”

  “Okay, Brother! And that’s all I want to know.” The man “John Doe” paused. “And so then—about my being found today where I was—and under what circum—”

  “Just a minute!” interrupted Penworth. He turned to Mullins. “Give me a foolscap sheet, Fre—Mr. Mullins. No, better a large pad. Yes—and a pencil.”

  And from that apparently voluminous drawer in that coarse deal table, Mullins produced what Penworth had requested, and handed them to his employer, who tore off several of the large sheets and making certain cryptic marks on the tops, laid them out in front of him. “Proceed,” he said curtly, in the direction of the defendant.

  And the single booming chime of the clock in back of him, announcing suddenly the hour of 11:30 p.m., seemed to re­peat his very command.

  “Right, Your Honor! Well, the whole thing really starts, in a sense, last night. Last night—at 9 p.m. An hour which, as I take it from the testimony I heard here tonight, is more than an hour and a half before this Adolph Reibach was knocked off. Not that even a fairish error there would matter to me—since the whole thing, with me in it, started not in Chicago at all, where Reibach was killed—but in a city that’s five hun­dred miles to the north of Chicago. For the whole thing started, you see, in—well, this was the way the whole thing began.”

  And while the entire courtroom listened so intently that the ticks of that big clock in back of Penworth’s desk seemed like a tiny hollow steel hammer regularly and monotonously hitting a tiny hollow anvil, the defendant, speaking smoothly and fluently and using phrases and words which were both those of the well-read man, and the man of the sporting world, commenced his story—a story which, unless it could successfully contravert each and every element of evidence and exhibit introduced in that room tonight, would land him in a certain chair provided with copper-lined straps for his ankles and his wrists!

  CHAPTER XII

  “—And That, Said the Defendant, “Is How it Was!”

  “And so,” said Judge Hilford Penworth musingly, at the end of the defendant’s story, his own fingertips reflectively together, his reading pince-nez now lying on the table in front of him, “you are a thief?”

  And almost as though echoing Penworth’s half-accusation, half-observation, the big grandfather’s clock against the wall in back of him struck the hour of 1:30 in the morning.

  “Yes, Your Honor,” the defendant was replying coolly from the partly raised witness chair where he was seated. “A thief, yes—but not a murderer. Nor even a man with the technical knowledge requisite to open safes.”

  “Just—just,” commented Penworth dryly, but with a frown of perplexity between his eyes, “a sort of mild, easy-going, gentlemanly house-prowler, as it were?”

  “Yes; or sneak thief—in plain English,” replied the defendant, apparently a bit nettled. “And just because, in the One-Time Life Handi­cap, the Old Starter Fate puts us jocks, all of us, in different saddles, is no reason wh—” But at this point the District Attorney interrupted the defendant.

  “Not being personally a ‘jock,’” he said witheringly, “nor riding in any handic—” He broke off sharply and turned to the Judge. “If the Court will permit,” he said angrily, “I have listened long and patiently to this long story, which has taken up the time of this court now for almost exactly two full hours, and—”

  Judge Penworth raised a restraining hand.

  “I likewise, Mr. Vann, have listened long and patiently—and with a left knee aching, and a right foot telegraphing irate messages to my brain. But because this defendant apparently had no witnesses whatsoever—and because he has been, after all, talking for his very life—and because I have realized that he would not be such a fool as to fabricate a story with real persons in it who couldn’t substantiate him, I’ve seen it through. A long story, all right, and—but the Court itself would like to interrogate the defendant on its high spots.”

  And long story it had indeed been! For the defendant, once started, had driven relentlessly on with scarcely even a breath between sentences. Almost his only pauses were at those points where the story held within itself natural “curtains”—curtains of surprise, or suspense, or mystification. For dramat­ic it had been, to say the least, a thing seemingly of wheels within wheels, and even tinier wheels within the smaller ones. Encompassing, as all its elements did—when taken in their entirety—a huge territory, and many, many persons, the story had, nevertheless, been presented, in actuality, like a play—for its main events had moved uninterruptedly over a single brief stretch of time—and had lain, as it might be said, within a single setting—a setting to which its characters had come, and from which they had departed—exactly like characters in a real stage drama. Too convincing to be false—far too objec­tive and colorful to be invented. A thing involving gangsters and gang death—and a Chinese laundryman suing a great bank—and a race meet in Mexico—an eccentric recluse who collected emeralds of all sizes and shapes—a suicide on the Pacific Ocean—a prostitute with seven fingers on each hand—a traffic officer with a Ph.D. degree!—a black London dive-keeper, scheduled to hang at dawn in Pentonville Pris­on—American secret-service men—a vengeful newspaper re­porter who tangled up the telephone service of an entire city—a pick­pocket and a farmer—a woman who retired once a year to a convent to pray for three days and nights—a Russian anarch­ist—a British actor-criminal with a tube of cyanide on his watch-chain—an exper
t safe-opener and a burglar-proof safe—all woven together into a tapestry in which warp tena­ciously held woof, and woof as tenaciously held warp—and tapestry itself held all who surveyed it.

  Commencing to talk, as the defendant had, at 11:30 p.m., when the trial had already been going on for three and a half hours, the big gold hands of the clock proclaiming the hour to be now 1:30 in the morning were silently corroborating the District Attorney’s last angry accusation. Practically two full hours had the defendant consumed. And his story—exactly as he had promised—had been a story laid not in Chicago at all, but in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And extending—as moreover he had claimed when he had begun speaking—over the entire course of the evening last gone—last night—from nine o’­clock, which was long before Adolph Reibach had, in Chica­go, been murdered, till practically midnight, long long after Reibach’s body, still in Chicago, had commenced to stiffen. Nor merely “sketched in” was the story, by any manner of means, at any of its segments; but detailed, it was, to the last degree—almost infinitely so in places—and delivered from beginning to end with the smashing directness of a battering ram, and by one to whom—apparently and presumably—the finest minutiæ of all the incidents he himself had participated in, bar none, were yet vigorously fresh; thus it was that the clock there against that rear wall of the courtroom had glided past its quarter hours with hardly anyone in the room perceiving it.

  But at last the speaker in that witness chair had come to the end of his story—the somewhat surprising end, too—since it had revealed him to be someone entirely other from the man he had appeared to he throughout the whole of the story—and, with a gesture of finality of both his hands, the manacled one and the unmanacled one, he had lapsed into polite silence as one waiting verdict of the Court—or dismissal from the witness chair. And it was then, of course, that the Judge had made his brief quizzical comment: “And so you are a thief?