The prosecutor asked the detective, “Does that give you an idea?”
“It sure does,” Schreiber said grimly. “I think that could be a tough one from the neighborhood.” He prodded Jerry. “You mean Herman Schweppes?”
Jerry nodded.
The prosecutor asked, “Do you have any idea, Jerry, why Herman did this job?”
“He couldn’t get at the barkeep,” Jerry said simply, “so he got at the first man he could.”
Schreiber added, “You don’t need to be a lawyer to see that.”
Jerry was placed in the antechamber and the prosecutor said, “We’ll need something more than Jerry. Three eyewitnesses, all friends of the dead man, tell us a different story. Jerry is a friend of Kennedy’s. It could be a frame.”
Schreiber picked up his straw hat. “Let me dig into it.”
It took a bit of doing. Herman Schweppes was located and a surveillance kept on his associates. Within two days, Schreiber identified his companions of the night. They were questioned vigorously until the story was developed.
The sailor did the trick. He was loyal to his friend — up to a point. But when the interrogation reached a peak of intensity he decided to get out of the middle. He gave Schweppes away.
Jerry Capone was right. Herman Schweppes had reason for his impulse. He had left the bar with rage in his heart because of his humiliation at the hands of the bartender. Schweppes was a parolee with a vicious criminal record. Any man in his path was in danger. Perhaps a white man might not have been attacked. But the defenseless sleeping old Caspar reminded him of the wounds from which he was smarting.
So, there it was — a flash of violence in the streets, a ready victim of suspicion and a routine investigation.
Kennedy would have been lost except for the uneasy feeling, shared by police and prosecutor, that he did not look and act like a killer. Until Jerry came in, there was no reason to doubt the eyewitnesses. They in turn were suspicious that the police were trying to save Kennedy, a white man, from punishment for killing a Negro. Because they would not credit the police with good faith, they refused to concede the possibility of error. The harder they were pressed, the more obstinately they insisted that they could not be wrong.
And yet the simple explanation was that in a short time interval between the criminal act and the alarum, Herman Schweppes had turned the corner and John Kennedy had stepped into his place.
If Kennedy had had a bad criminal record, there would have been another story. What else do the police have in the average case except eyewitnesses upon whom they must rely?
John Kennedy was lucky that Jerry Capone saw the killing and told the story to his sister, Margaret. He was lucky that the prosecutor took the trouble to get the truth from his reluctant sister. He was lucky, in fact, that Jerry Capone reached the prosecutor before he reached a defense lawyer — the story believed in the prosecutor’s office would have been torn apart under cross-examination in Court.
Clues, evidence, ratiocination, brilliant sleuthing, the embellishments of fiction — these have their place. But for the ordinary case, experience and sound instincts and a deep sense of responsibility are the strongest shield of the innocent.
Stuart Palmer
Of all the literary forms, comedy has the shortest shelf life. Stuart Palmer’s, on the other hand, has outlived its creator, and thanks to International Polygonics Ltd., some of his finest books from the 1930s through 1950s, landmarks in the comic crime tradition, are back in print. Included in this new series is his first critical and commercial triumph, The Penguin Pool Murder (1931). It chronicles the life and times of “that meddlesome old battle axe,” Miss Hildegarde Withers, a spinster schoolteacher with a taste for fancy headgear. Later in his career, Palmer introduced a second character, Howie Rook, “an old newspaperman turned out to the pasture.” Rook, like Palmer, occasionally wrote true crime. Rivaling his most outrageous fiction, the story before you now takes you on a doomed voyage with Captain Walter Wanderwell, “a world traveler, adventurer and soldier of misfortune,” and his crew of madcap, but wholly incompetent, Argonauts. It goes to prove even real murder can be fun — when it’s in the right hands.
Once Aboard the Lugger
Curtain rises on a lonely, deserted dock on the Long Beach waterfront, where the rakish black schooner Carma has just been moored that afternoon. The date is December 6, 1932; the hour 9:30 of a dank and dripping evening. One feeble 20-watt bulb dangles overhead and there is a faint glow from a few lighted portholes of the gently-rocking old vessel, a former rum-runner with still a bit of stagger to her.
That is the setting of Act One. Enter the chorus, consisting of eight very pretty girls and seven handsome men, most of them in their early twenties. They are all living aboard the schooner, supposedly engaged in preparing for an adventure cruise to Tahiti and Samoa and the glamorous South Seas. It is nice casting. One girl is a bewitching authoress and poet from Atlanta, one a bob-haired student from Boston and Wellesley... there’s a cute, plump secretary from Manhattan, another poet, a painter, a dishwasher, a sailor or two (but not very salty) and an actress who had played Juliet in summer stock. And there is even a handsome young man with a heavy Oxford accent who claimed to be the son of a British peer — and was!
We might have a fanfare of martial music while the principals enter. In the top starring role is Captain Walter Wanderwell, leader of the expedition. He is a tall, handsome, stiffly-military chap who always wears boots and a self-designed uniform — a distinct Nordic type with cold blue eyes and a jutting chin, very much resembling Hairbreadth Harry. If you can’t remember that hero of the comics, then consider the Captain a combination of Fearless Fosdick and Superman with a dash of Clyde Beatty. He is a world-traveler, adventurer, and soldier of misfortune.
There is also, as heroine and leading woman, his wife Aloha Wanderwell. She is six feet and 140 pounds of blonde, curly-haired pulchritude, with a figure which has to make concessions to no stack of wheat-cakes, in spite of the fact that she almost always dressed in another of those home-designed, stiffly military uniforms. Aloha was — and for that matter is — a woman in whom I and the other newsmen assigned to the story took an obviously deep interest, and for whom we have a most healthy respect.
For further audience sympathy we have also the Wanderwells’ two children — Valerie, aged seven, and Nile who is pushing six, both members of the strange “crew.” Little Val was the nominal owner of the vessel, since her father was not an American citizen and thus could not own a ship under United States registry. She was no doubt the youngest shipowner in history.
And — to round out the cast — there is a slight, wavy-haired, good-looking young man in a gray cravanette raincoat. You can choose his role yourself — juvenile lead, very heavy villain... or comedy relief. He later stood trial for his life on the charge of having shot Captain Wanderwell through the back of the neck. Certain highlights of that memorable trial, presented here for the first time from my own records and with the amiable assistance of Judge Robert W. Kenny, who presided, are worth bringing up in this account.
Captain Wanderwell and his fifteen merry, madcap adventurers were all living aboard the Carma (the new name of the old rum-runner being Wanderwell’s own misspelling of Karma, the Buddhist word for Fate), although the rickety vessel had not been conditioned nor fully provisioned, and her sailing date for Tahiti and points south was, to say the least, highly indefinite. But they had no place else to live, since each had contributed all the loose cash he or she had toward the trip’s expenses. Wanderwell himself had somehow raised the considerable amount of $22,000 with which to buy the ship, although his last venture — in the wilds of South America — had been spectacularly unsuccessful. He had purchased the old rum-runner at a government auction of seized ships, and had managed to have her towed to her present berth.