“If she’d been there that long I would have noticed her.”
“From six to eight-twenty?”
“Yes.”
“Even as it was, and she was nervous, you didn’t notice her immediately, did you?”
“I suppose not.”
“So you now feel she must have been there some time before you noticed her even with all the nervousness that you have testified to.”
“I don’t think she could have been there very long before eight o’clock.”
“But she must have been there before eight o’clock,” Mason said, “because when you saw her, you saw her at the phone booth and she was nervous. You didn’t see her when she entered.”
“No.”
“Then she had entered before you saw her?”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t know how long before?”
“No.”
“Then if something happened to make her nervous at eight o’clock, that would account for your noticing her.”
“I noticed her because she hung around the telephone booth and acted in a nervous manner.”
“Exactly,” Mason said. “So what you are actually testifying to is that at eight o’clock this woman became sufficiently nervous for you to notice her.”
“Yes.”
“Now, that nervousness, of course, could have been due to some telephone call that she put through, some information she received on the telephone?”
“It could have been due to anything. I’m not trying to state what caused the woman to be nervous, but only that she was nervous.”
“And because of that nervousness you noticed her?”
“Yes.”
“That’s all,” Mason said.
“Call Alexander Redfield,” Dexter said.
Mason said, “I will stipulate as to Mr. Redfield that he has all of the qualifications of an expert in the field of ballistics and firearms identification, subject to my right to cross-examine. I am only making this stipulation to save time on the direct examination. I reserve the right to cross-examine as to his qualifications if I so desire.”
“Very well. We will accept that stipulation.”
Dexter turned to the witness. “Mr. Redfield, did you receive three bullets from Dr. Phillip C. Foley?”
“I did.”
“And did you place those bullets where you could be certain they were not contaminated in any way?”
“I did.”
“And later on, did you compare them with a weapon for the purpose of seeing whether they had been fired from that weapon?”
“I did.”
“Can you tell us something generally about firearms identification and bullet matching?”
“Each barrel has its own peculiarities,” Redfield said. “There are, of course, class characteristics, such as the number of lands, the pitch, the direction of the pitch, the rotation, the width and spacing. Those are what we call class characteristics. For instance, the Colt Firearms Company manufactures barrels having certain distinctive class characteristics. The Smith and Wesson barrels have entirely different class characteristics.
“In addition to these class characteristics there are also what we refer to as individual characteristics. Those individual characteristics are the result of those minute imperfections in a barrel which cause striations on a bullet which is fired through that barrel.
“Given a gun and a fatal bullet which is not too badly disfigured by impact, we are nearly always able to fire a test bullet through the gun and match it with the fatal bullet so that we can tell positively whether the fatal bullet was fired from the gun in question.”
“And you tested these bullets, which were given you, with a firearm?”
“Yes, sir, with a Hi-Standard nine-shot twenty-two revolver of the brand known as Sentinel. That is a particular brand made by the High Standard Manufacturing Corporation. The number of this particular gun was one, one, one, one, eight, eight, four. It had a nine-shot cylinder, a two and three-eighths inch barrel.”
“And what was the caliber of that gun?”
“Twenty-two.”
“What else can you tell us about that weapon?”
“It was a nine-shot revolver. Three of the chambers had been fired. There were three empty shells in the cylinder and six loaded cartridges. The gun was registered in the name of the defendant.”
“And what can you tell us about the three twenty-two caliber bullets which were handed to you by Dr. Foley?”
“They had all been fired from this gun.”
“You may cross-examine,” Dexter said.
“No questions,” Mason said smiling.
Judge Madison said, “It now having reached the noon hour, gentlemen, Court will adjourn until one-thirty this afternoon. The defendant is remanded to custody.”
Chapter Fifteen
Mason, Della Street and Paul Drake gathered in the little private dining room of the restaurant near the Hall of Justice where they habitually had lunch when trying a case in court.
When they had given their orders, Mason got up and started pacing the room.
“The secret of the thing is that damned gun,” he said.
“It’s Maxine’s gun, all right.”
“Of course it’s her gun,” Mason said. “It’s registered in her name. But there has to be something more in connection with it.”
“What more would they need?” Drake asked.
“Maxine’s story,” Mason said, “is that she kept the gun in a drawer by the bed in her apartment. Anyone who was familiar with the apartment would know where she kept the gun. Anyone could have taken the gun and committed the murder.”
“And then left the gun where?” Della Street asked.
“Presumably someplace in the apartment,” Mason said.
“But we didn’t see it there,” Della pointed out. “That is, the murderer didn’t simply drop it on the floor.”
Mason nodded. ‘That doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been there. It could have been put back in the drawer.”
“That’s about the only place it could have been,” Drake said. “If Maxine had taken it with her, she’d have told you, wouldn’t she?”
“Heaven knows,” Mason said. “You can’t tell what a client will do, particularly a woman client. They get enmeshed in a series of events that seem to trap them and they almost invariably try to deceive their attorneys.”
“Well,” Drake said, “it quite definitely wasn’t in her possession when she was taken into custody.”
“Suppose she’d hidden it somewhere,” Della Street said.
“Then the police wouldn’t have found it at all,” Drake said. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about on the gun except the fact that it’s hers, Perry. That gives the prosecution all of a case that it needs against Maxine, at least for the preliminary hearing.”
“They’ve got something else,” Mason said, and resumed moodily pacing the floor.
Suddenly he paused and said, “Paul, I want you to find out if you can how often Olney has used his yacht during the past three months. I’d like to have you find out something about the caretaker system there at the yacht club; how many persons are there as caretakers or watchmen. In other words, how many people we would have to screen if we wanted to determine whether bribery had been used to get aboard the yacht. We’ve got to find out more about the particular bunco game that Durant was playing.”
“It seems to me it’s quite simple,” Drake said. “He gets someone to make a fake painting. Then he passes the word around that a reputable art dealer has sold a wealthy collector a fake picture. The art dealer gets mad, the man who has purchased the picture becomes furious, they get a bunch of art experts to appraise the picture and then file suit against Durant.
“Then Durant manages to substitute the forged painting for the original. The case comes to court. Durant proves the picture is a forgery and cashes in.”