“Yes,” Adele Blane said. “She told me why.”
“What did she say?”
“She said that she was afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Afraid of herself?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Obviously,” McNair said to the witness, “if she had been afraid of her husband, she would have kept the gun. Throwing it away means only that she was afraid of herself. Isn’t that the way you understood her, Miss Blane?”
Mason came to his feet then, quietly, confidently. “Your Honor,” he said, “I object to the question. It is argumentative. It is an attempt on the part of counsel to cross-examine his own witness. It calls for a conclusion of the witness. I have made no effort to prevent the facts from getting before the jury. Nor have I objected to the leading questions asked of this witness. But I do object to argumentative, improper questions such as these.”
McNair started to argue, but Judge Canfield gestured him into silence. “The objection,” he said, “is sustained. The question is clearly improper.”
McNair pounced back on the witness, resuming his attack with a redoubled fury, convincing jurors and spectators, as well as the witness, that here was a man who could not be stopped, who was only stimulated by rebuffs to fight harder.
“What did your sister do after that?”
“She got in her car.”
“Where was her car?”
“It was parked a short distance up the road.”
“You mean by that it was parked on the main highway?”
“Yes.”
“It was not parked on the side road which led up to your father’s cabin.”
“No.”
“And then what did she do?”
“Followed me back to town.”
“At your suggestion?”
“Yes.”
“And then what happened?”
“When I got to Kenvale, I missed her.”
“You mean that she deliberately avoided you?”
“I don’t know. I only know that she didn’t follow me to the house.”
“And what did you do? Where did you go?”
“I went to Roxbury.”
“Yes,” McNair said, somewhat sneeringly, “you went to Roxbury. You went directly to the home of the defendant, Dr. Jefferson Macon. You asked for the doctor, and were advised he was out on a call. Isn’t that right?”
“That is substantially correct.”
“And you waited for Dr. Macon to return, did you not?”
“Yes.”
“And when did he return?”
“At approximately ten-thirty.”
“And what did you say to the defendant, Dr. Macon?”
“I asked him if he had seen my sister.”
“And what did he say?”
“Just a moment,” Judge Canfield said. “The jury will be instructed that at this particular time, any statement testified to by this witness as having been made by Dr. Macon will be received in evidence only as against the defendant, Macon, as a declaration made by him. It will not be binding upon the defendant, Hardisty, or be received as evidence against her. Proceed, Miss Blane, to answer the question.”
She was close to tears now. “He said he had not seen my sister.”
“Cross-examine,” McNair snapped at Mason.
“No questions,” Mason said with calm dignity.
Then McNair apparently went off on a detour. He began introducing evidence concerning the spade which belonged to Jack Hardisty. A witness testified that he had seen Hardisty using a spade in the garden. Was there anything peculiar about that spade, anything distinctive, McNair asked? And the witness stated that he had noticed the initials J. H. cut in the wood.
Would the witness know that spade if he saw it again?
The witness thought he would.
With something of a flourish, McNair sent an attendant scurrying to an anteroom. He returned with a spade which was duly presented to the witness for identification.
Yes, that was the spade. Those were the initials. He was satisfied that that was the identical spade he had seen in Jack Hardisty’s hands.
There was no cross-examination.
McNair looked at the clock. It was approaching the hour of the afternoon adjournment. Obviously, McNair was looking for some peculiarly dramatic bit of evidence with which to close the first day’s evidence.
“Charles Renfrew,” he called.
Charles Renfrew proved to be a man in the early fifties, slow and deliberate of speech and motion, a man who quite evidently had no terror of cross-examination, but considered his sojourn on the witness stand with the satisfaction of a man who enjoys being in the public eye.
He was, it seemed, a member of the police force of Roxbury. He had searched the grounds about the house where the defendant, Dr. Jefferson Macon, had his residence and his office.
McNair said, “Mr. Renfrew, I am going to show you a spade which has been marked for identification in this case, and ask you if you have seen that spade before.”
“That’s right,” Renfrew said. “I found that spade—”
“The question was whether you had seen it before,” McNair interrupted.
“Yes, sir. I have seen it before.”
“When?”
“That day I made the search, October third.”
“Where did you see it?”
“In a freshly spaded-up garden patch back of the garage on Dr. Macon’s property.”
“And you’re certain this is the same spade you found at that place at that time?”
“Yes, sir.”
McNair’s smile was triumphant. “You don’t, of course, know how this spade was transported from that mountain cabin to Dr. Macon’s residence?”
Mason said, “Objected to, Your Honor, assuming a fact not in evidence as well as calling for a conclusion of the witness. There is no evidence that this was the spade Jack Hardisty had in his car.”
McNair said instantly, “Counsel is right, Your Honor, I’ll prove that tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ll withdraw this question.” He flashed a smile at the jurors.
Once more there was no cross-examination.
McNair went rapidly ahead. Rodney Beaton told of seeing the defendant, Milicent Hardisty, standing near the edge of a barranca by the roadway, some object in her hand, her arm drawn back. He couldn’t swear, he admitted, that she had actually thrown this object down the barranca. She might have changed her mind at the last minute. He also testified that the next day he and Lola Strague had been searching the vicinity of the granite outcropping. They had found a thirty-eight caliber revolver pressed down in the pine needles. He identified the gun.
Mason made no cross-examination.
Lola Strague, called as a witness, also told of finding the gun, and identified it. Then McNair, with a dramatic gesture, introduced in evidence records that showed this gun had been purchased by Vincent P. Blane two days before Christmas of 1941.
At that point McNair looked at the clock significantly and Judge Canfield, taking the hint, announced that it had reached the usual hour for the evening adjournment.
McNair left the courtroom wearing an expression of complete self-satisfaction wreathed all over his countenance. His exit was punctuated by brilliant flashes as news photographers took action shots for the morning editions.
Chapter 21
McNair started his second day of taking testimony with a technique that left no doubt he was deliberately building this case upon a series of dramatic climaxes. Court attachés and jurors, who had become accustomed to the conventional dry-as-dust method of building a murder case from accusation to conviction, began to throng the courtroom, attracted by this dynamic personality, who was, for the moment, presenting so colorful a figure.