The Devil's Tickets

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  But Reed had a different view. For one, he refused to divorce Lura. He could not—and would not—do that. They had been married forty-three years, since even before Nell was born. Further, Reed told Nell that he would never marry an Irishwoman. He said he had endured more than enough from Pendergast machine voters, the shanty Irish working in the guts and grime of the stockyards. Reed knew that Nell’s father, as a teenager, had emigrated from County Cork, Ireland, before the Civil War, and that he had married Catherine Fitzgibbons, daughter of Irish immigrants. Jim Reed was saying he did not want to marry Nell. Decades later, Nell demurely looked down at her hands, placed neatly in her lap, and said, “But I talked him out of that one.”

  With the Bennett trial under way, the senator and Nell agreed they would sit down with Paul Donnelly. They would tell him the child belonged to Reed and that if Paul said a word to anyone, he would risk all their reputations and, worse, the financial well-being of the Donnelly Garment Company.

  Nell and Jim Reed agreed there was but one way to extricate themselves from this thicket. Before making any move they would have to wait for Lura to die.

  Myrtle, Jo, and Nell all waited on their men. Myrtle had sat at home, waiting endlessly for Jack to come off the road. Nell went about the daily business of her dressmaking waiting for Reed to deliver her from marital hell. Jo suffered two forms of waiting: at the bridge table, as the calculating Ely intentionally took forever to decide on his bids, and at home, as she waited for him to leave his cocoon of self-absorption.

  Yet none of these women was particularly submissive. In fact, for their times, they were at the opposite end of the spectrum: Myrtle, the competitive bridge player and one-time stenographer; Nell, the millionaire entrepreneur; and Jo, the trailblazer fearlessly invading male inner sanctums. These three women shared a constitutionally low tolerance for waiting that made their waiting particularly unbearable and that would lead, naturally, to flare-ups and extremes of behavior.

  Bulldog was the word often used to describe the combative prosecutor Jim Page. In truth, he looked more like a St. Bernard, sad-faced, with jowls, his girth filling out his dark suits.

  Page’s opening statement was brief, direct. He described the bridge game at the Bennett apartment and the altercation it prompted. He said Jack had died after being chased through the apartment by Myrtle, and that she had fired four shots, the first two missing, the next two proving fatal. “The evidence will show that this woman, before she shot her husband, traveled 60 or 70 feet to get that gun, opened and closed two doors, turned off and on lights,” Page said. And then, he added, “[s]he came up behind and shot her husband in the back.… The evidence will show that blood was on both sides of the [front] door as the man was shot going out of his own home. He came back and died on the inside of his own place.” Page intended to call Charles Hofman as his first witness. If the Hofmans altered their earlier sworn statements, Page intended to shift course and present much of his case in rebuttal. He told the jury, “It was felonious, malicious, willful and premeditated murder with malice aforethought.”

  Now it was Reed’s turn. The senator could have waited to deliver his opening statement until after the state had presented its case. He opted to weigh in now, though. His thatch of white hair neatly parted, his horn-rimmed glasses far down his nose, Reed began softly, grandfatherly. From the back rows of the courtroom, women spectators leaned forward. From the first row, Jack’s siblings eyed the senator warily. Page waited for the senator’s theatrics, certain they would come.

  “Gentlemen of the jury,” Reed began, “after hearing the statement of the state’s case as recited by Mr. Page, I can’t understand why he signed that information.” Twenty years before, as prosecutor in the Swope murder trial, Reed had told jurors, “I have never tried to appeal to your passions. I have not tried to wring a tear. It is the cheapest and easiest thing that a lawyer ever did.” But just now, as he led jurors through a detailed history of Myrtle’s humble upbringing, telling of how her father’s death had left her and Alice Adkins destitute, Reed’s lips quivered and his eyes grew moist.

  “I object,” Page shouted from the prosecutor’s chair. “Whether she was destitute has nothing to do with this case.”

  Reed told Judge Latshaw he only wanted to show his client’s life history.

  Page exploded: “I don’t want him standing there trembling, tears in his eyes, talking about the defendant being destitute.”

  Reed: “Maybe you would tremble, too, if the facts of this woman’s life were—”

  Page: “I’ll tremble because this defendant shot her husband in the back!”

  Latshaw’s gavel thundered. “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” he said. Reed continued. Hearing the senator tell her life story, Myrtle, sitting at the defendant’s table, sobbed and dabbed a handkerchief at her eyes.

  Page rose from his chair: “I want to tell this court that if the defense counsel proposes to give the defendant’s life history, I’ll call enough witnesses to give the life history of the deceased. What’s fair to one is fair to the other.”

  Undeterred, Reed told of his client’s years as a telephone operator and a stenographer, and when he mentioned her work in a law office, he turned to Myrtle and asked how long she had held that job.

  About three years, Myrtle replied, through broken sobs.

  Infuriated by what he was seeing—emotion, tears, a goddamn stage show—Page asked Latshaw to pause long enough to give “counsel for the defense and his client a chance to finish their cry.”

  “Jim, I just can’t help it,” Reed told the prosecutor. Then Reed said, “I am not trying to be emotional. I wish I could be as coldblooded about it as some in this courtroom.”

  In this case, Reed told jurors, he would show Jack as a competent young man with a temper, a character flaw perhaps, and how, when he departed on business trips, he left his .32 Colt automatic pistol with Alice Adkins, his mother-in-law, for her protection. He said Adkins knew about guns, having lived in Mississippi, as he would put it, “among the colored folk.” But, he added, “I don’t imagine she had seen many of those devilish weapons such as her son-in-law gave her.” Reed then described the day of the killing, the golf outing and the bridge game with the Hofmans. Reed said he didn’t play much bridge, but he loosely described the bidding of the fatal hand, and said that when Myrtle was dummy she left the table to devotedly prepare Jack’s breakfast and to pack his bag, “as she always did, and as a wife should.” Upon her return, he said, a bridge table argument broke out between husband and wife, and Jack slapped Myrtle five or six times in the face, “hard.” Now Reed emphasized: “He talked to his wife, gentlemen of the jury, of abandoning her.” Jack ordered Myrtle to retrieve his gun, Reed said, kept in her mother’s bedroom, in a chest of drawers, beneath linens. “Crying, Mrs. Bennett obeyed, as she was in the habit of doing when her husband asked her.” He said Myrtle turned on the light in her mother’s room, still sobbing, took the gun and walked into the den. There, Reed said, she saw Charles Hofman step from the master bathroom and approach her. Hofman’s movement startled her, Reed said, and she stumbled against a chair in the den and the gun discharged twice, accidentally. (A few feet away, Myrtle’s sobs grew louder. O’Sullivan patted her hand to comfort her.) “She started into the living room, and Bennett rushed toward her. No doubt he had heard the shots. No doubt he was alarmed. He caught her this way—come here and let me show how it was done.”

  On cue, O’Sullivan stood. Reed grabbed Jack’s gun from the counsel table, the .32 Colt automatic with a steel barrel, and held it in his right hand. The sight of the pistol had the intended effect: the eyes of jurors widened. Standing before the jury box, the two defense attorneys acted out a struggle for the weapon, Reed as Myrtle and O’Sullivan as Jack. They had rehearsed this many times. O’Sullivan (Jack) twisted the wrist of Reed (Myrtle) until the pistol passed under O’Sullivan’s armpit. Reed told jurors, “He twisted her arm so the gun was in this positio
n and then it accidentally discharged. Now gentlemen, you have been told that he was shot in the back but the physical facts of this case, and the answer to that charge, is that he was shot in the armpit, accidentally.” Page stood next to the two defense attorneys to watch more closely their pantomime of the killing.

  Reed said that evidence would also show powder burns on Jack’s white polo shirt, burns that could not have been made if this particular weapon had been fired at Jack from a distance greater than twelve inches.

  Alone now before the jury, Reed fingered the killing weapon, the pistol’s black rubber grip comfortable in his hand. He pressed the pistol under his arm, wheeled before jurors and showed where the bullet exited. “That shot would have been impossible if Mr. Bennett had been trying to run away from the house,” he said.

  From his chair, Page spoke: “That’s a question of argument.”

  And Reed roared back, “We’ll show that!” Then Reed twisted his arm and the gun at a slightly different angle, to demonstrate how the other bullet must have struck Jack.

  He described the final scene: Myrtle on the living room floor cradling her dying husband, inconsolable, calling for a doctor. Reed’s voice soared, and then broke and trembled, reduced at the end to a whisper. He said, “Then Bennett, still conscious—he only lived a few minutes—tried to speak to Mrs. Adkins—he called her ‘Mother’—and reached out and, and [Reed’s eyes were moist again, his voice barely audible]… took his wife’s hand.

  “That, gentlemen, is the murder case here.

  “Alas, Mrs. Bennett is charged with willfully, deliberately, in cold blood and with malice aforethought murdering the man she loved.”

  Charles Hofman, the state’s first witness, testified, “Bennett dealt and bid one spade. I bid two diamonds. Mrs. Bennett raised to four spades—it was contract bridge. Mrs. Hofman passed, and I, realizing I had a good hand, doubled. Bennett played the hand and naturally I won. He went set two tricks.” As that Sunday evening bridge game developed, Hofman testified, “there was quite a lot of criticism as to the card playing between Mr. and Mrs. Bennett—this is a common thing during a bridge game.” Hearing this, women spectators tittered. Hofman’s testimony about the game and how Jack struck Myrtle and then moved between rooms “like a crazy man,” offered no surprises. In his fine dark suit, Hofman stood before the jury box explaining the movements of the players that night, pointing at a diagram of the apartment, even helping the prosecutor hold it. But then, in a critical turn, Page asked, “Is it or is it not a fact that when you went into the bathroom, that Mr. Bennett was rummaging through his dresser drawers and picking up his clothes in his bedroom?”

  “The last I saw of Mr. Bennett,” Hofman replied, “he was standing right alongside the bed.”

  Page froze. He was incredulous, furious. Hofman had just changed Jack’s position, moving him diagonally across the bedroom, and therefore out of Myrtle’s view as she approached from the den, pistol in hand. In the preliminary hearing two weeks after the killing, Hofman had testified that Jack stood by a chest of drawers near the bathroom door. Page’s theory of a chase through the apartment that night—his entire case, really—rested on Jack’s position. He had to be right there, by the chest of drawers in the bedroom where Myrtle could see him through two open bathroom doors.

  Page: “You didn’t answer the question and I am asking it again. Answer it yes or no.”

  Hofman: “I don’t know what he was doing.”

  Reed: “Wait a minute. I object to that. It is an attempt to impeach his own witness.”

  Page handed Hofman a copy of his testimony at the preliminary hearing, “for the purpose of refreshing your memory.” Reed objected again, and Latshaw sent the jury from the room. There followed an hour of spirited arguments between attorneys and the judge. Reed insisted the law did not allow Page to impeach his own witnesses, and Latshaw agreed. But Page said he must be permitted to show jurors how Hofman—Myrtle’s good friend—had changed his testimony. Reed accused the prosecutor of “bulldozing and intimidating” the witness, while an exasperated Hofman said from the stand, “Mr. Page, I am a salesman and not a lawyer.” Now Page told the judge, “I had a right to believe that the sworn testimony of this witness at the preliminary hearing would be his testimony now… It never occurred to me at any time that this witness would testify to anything to the contrary until I heard Senator Reed’s opening statement this morning. I made my opening statement as to what the evidence would show based absolutely upon the sworn testimony of this man.” Page read from Hofman’s earlier testimony about Jack’s position: “He was rummaging through his dresser drawers and picking up his clothes.” Then, seeing Myrtle approaching, Hofman had testified, “I said, ‘My God, Myrtle, what are you going to do?’ and she brushed me aside and opened fire … I stood right there, glued to the floor in the den… She went through the bathroom into the bedroom, no doubt.”

  “Now, Brother Page,” Latshaw said, his tone condescending, “show me wherein he contradicts himself.” Page contended that Hofman had moved Jack out of Myrtle’s view and so shattered the prosecutor’s contention that Myrtle had twice fired at her husband through the bathroom. Page said one bullet had lodged in the bathroom door-jamb and another splintered a hole through the far door that the fleeing Jack had slammed shut to use as a shield.

  Myrtle bit her fingernails. The argument shifted. Now prosecutor and judge went at it. Page sought to reword his questions to Hofman in order to bypass Reed’s objections, but Latshaw sustained the senator’s objection each time. In a huff, Page threw down papers on the counsel table. Latshaw, flushed, rose from his seat and angrily pointed at Page. The prosecutor, enraged, said, “The jury is entitled to know the whole circumstances. I think it would be an absolute injustice for me to have to take the testimony of this man today wherein it is changed as to the material things. I might just as well dismiss this case and walk out of court.… and I don’t think it is the intention of the courts of this country to permit a thing of this kind to happen without the jury knowing all the facts.”

  With the jury still out of earshot, Reed joined the fray: “The prosecutor would have you understand, I suppose, that she fired shots through this door—blindly through a door—at a man that she didn’t know was there at all. Now it is ridiculous, any such argument as that.… [Hofman] is intelligent, he has told the story in a straightforward manner and he didn’t get started to telling it until this proceeding began of attempting to coerce and to prejudice and to mislead this witness in order to get something that it is claimed this witness said at another time, before this jury… This man is not testifying to anything today that he has not testified to at this preliminary hearing. Mr. Page is trying to put a construction on some language to suit himself.”

  Page held his ground, barking and jabbing his arm into the air. Latshaw, flashing his own anger, said, “Suppose, Brother Page, you do succeed in proving to the jury that this man is a perjurer; that is as far as you can go. Where is your case then? You can’t substitute the statement made there for his statement made here. The law says you can’t.”

  Page fought for his case: “You ask me where I would be. I would have to step into another court and prosecute this man for perjury.”

  Reed objected. Latshaw said, “That sort of idle threat passes as idle wind.”

  The judge made his decision: “Sometimes the only way a person can see the light is by falling in the darkness … I am going to allow you to impeach the witness, against my judgment, and with a firm conviction that you are putting in this record, in case of a conviction of this woman, an absolutely fatal error.”

  The next morning, the jury back in the courtroom, Hofman returned to the stand. Page handed him a transcript of his earlier testimony. Hofman read it, and then Page led him carefully to this question: “Then as you came through the bedroom and went into the bathroom where was Mr. Bennett?” Charles Hofman answered, “I recollect that he was prancing back
and forth between the chest of drawers and the bed.” Page took a deep breath, his case once again on more solid ground.

  On cross-examination, Reed sought to undo that gain. “You state that Mr. Bennett was moving back and forth from one room to another, you were trying to comfort Mrs. Bennett, and trying to quiet Mr. Bennett down, and he was moving about constantly—it is impossible for you, is it not, at this time, to say where Mr. Bennett was at any particular moment, except when you came back into the room and found him [slumping] on that chair?”

  Page shouted his objection, which Latshaw overruled.

  Said Hofman, “Yes.”

  Through other witnesses, Page constructed his portrait of a chase. A maid, Willetta Henry, testified that she and her husband, a Park Manor janitor, lived in the basement beneath the Bennett apartment. At about fifteen minutes past midnight, Henry said, she entered her bathroom, directly beneath the Bennett den and bathroom, and heard two gunshots. Frightened, she ran into her bedroom and awakened her husband. Then she heard two more gunshots upstairs, farther away than the others. Her story supported Page’s notion of a chase. The third-floor neighbor Bill Reid took the stand and testified that he heard three shots. He feared a holdup was under way and asked his departing guests not to leave, afraid for their safety. Moments later, he said, he heard a knock at his door, and a woman’s voice calling to his wife, “Mrs. Reid, let me in. It’s Mrs. Hofman.” Mayme Hofman entered and told them what had just happened. Bill Reid and a friend accompanied Mayme to the Bennett apartment, where they saw Jack on the floor, dying, cradled in Myrtle’s arms. Reid said he found Jack’s pistol on the floor near the front door, and gave it to a patrolman.