“No need of the grandstand,” Hamilton Burger said. “There’s no jury here.”
Judge Madison smiled but said quietly, “I would like to have counsel refrain from personalities, please.”
Mason said, “Maxine, you remember the night of the thirteenth?”
“Very well,” she said.
“You knew Collin Durant in his lifetime?”
“Yes.”
“How long had you known him?”
“Some— I can’t remember. Three or four years.”
“Were you friendly with him?”
“I had been friendly with him and — well, I knew him. I did things for him.”
“Now,” Mason said, “I want you to listen to my questions very carefully, Maxine, and answer the questions without volunteering information.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you acquainted with Otto Olney?”
“I am.”
“Were you present on his yacht at a time when you had a conversation with Mr. Durant about one of Mr. Olney’s paintings?”
“Yes.”
“And what did Mr. Durant say?”
Judge Madison pursed his lips. “We’re now getting into a realm where—”
Hamilton Burger jumped to his feet. “If the Court please,” he said, “we are not making any objection. We want Mr. Mason to go right ahead. Every subject that he opens up gives us a new gambit for cross-examination. We don’t intend to object to any question he may ask.”
“I can appreciate the attitude of the district attorney,” Judge Madison said, “but after all, this Court has a crowded calendar... However, there being no objection, I’ll let the question stand.”
“Can you tell us what happened with reference to one of the paintings?” Mason asked.
“Mr. Durant came to me and told me that a painting Mr. Olney had on his yacht, a painting supposedly by Phellipe Feteet, was a fake. Later on he told me to report that conversation to Mr. Rankin.”
“And who is Mr. Rankin?”
“That is Lattimer Rankin, an art dealer. He was, I believe, the art dealer who had sold Mr. Olney the picture.”
“And what did Mr. Durant tell you about this picture?”
“He said in effect that I was to tell Mr. Rankin that he, Durant, had pronounced the picture a fake and that it was a fraud.”
“That was a painting of some women under a tree?”
“Yes.”
Mason said, “I am going to show you a picture which was marked for identification and ask you if that is the same picture.”
Judge Madison looked at Hamilton Burger. “No objection,” Hamilton Burger said, beaming. “We want counsel to have all the rope he wants to take.”
Judge Madison pointed out, “This probably will lay the foundation for the introduction of that picture in evidence.”
“If he wants to put the defendant on the stand in order to get it in, let him put it in,” Hamilton Burger said. “Let him put in anything he wants, let him open all doors for our cross-examination.”
“Very well,” Judge Madison said crisply.
Mason said, “I’ll put it this way, Maxine. I’m going to show you a picture which was marked for identification. You saw that picture at the time it was brought into court?”
“I did.”
“Now, listen to the question carefully, Maxine. Is that picture, that painting which I now show you and which has been marked tentatively for identification as Defendant’s Exhibit Number One, is that the painting, the one Mr. Durant pointed out to you, and which he told you to tell Mr. Rankin was a forgery?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you answer the question any better than that?”
“I’ll say this, it is a painting that is absolutely similar. If it isn’t the same one that was hanging there, it looks like the same one.”
“Now, on the night of the thirteenth did you have any further conversation with Mr. Durant?”
“I did.”
“At what time?”
“At about six o’clock in the evening.”
“And what did Mr. Durant tell you at that time?”
“Mr. Durant told me to get out of town, fast, and not to leave any trail — not to stop to take anything with me, just to get out.”
“When did he tell you to leave?”
“Within an hour. He said I couldn’t be in my apartment any later than that.”
“Did you have any conversation about money?”
“I told him that I didn’t have enough money to travel and he said that he would try to get me some money. He said I was to wait an hour for him to return, that if he could raise some money for me he would do so; that if he couldn’t, I would have to get along as best I could, even if I had to hitchhike or wire my sister for money.”
“You have a married sister living in Eugene, Oregon?”
“I do.”
“Did you report to Mr. Durant that you had told Mr. Rankin that the picture in Otto Olney’s yacht, in the main salon of that yacht, the picture purporting to be by Phellipe Feteet, was a fake?”
“Yes.”
“And did you tell him anything you had done in connection with that litigation?”
“Yes, I told him that I had signed an affidavit in your office, stating that Mr. Durant had told me the Phellipe Feteet in Otto Olney’s yacht was a fake.”
“And it was after you had made that statement to Mr. Durant that he told you to get out of town?”
“Yes.”
“Now I’m going to ask you, Maxine, if Mr. Durant had some hold on you?”
“He did, yes.”
“There was some bit of information that he was threatening to disclose if you did not do as he wished?”
“Yes.”
Mason said, “If the Court please, I feel that this painting should now be introduced in evidence.”
“We object to having the painting introduced in evidence at this time,” Hamilton Burger said. “There is nothing to show that it is a forged Phellipe Feteet painting, there is nothing to show that it ever hung on the wall of the main salon in Otto Olney’s yacht and—”
“We don’t claim that it ever hung on the wall there,” Mason said. “We don’t think it did.”
“What?” Judge Madison asked, puzzled.
“I think, if the Court please,” Mason said, “the plot was much deeper than appeared on the surface.”
Hamilton Burger said, “Of course, if the Court please, this whole thing is extraneous except as it shows motivation for murder, and we want to develop that gambit on cross-examination. However, let us suppose that the decedent was a swindler who was engaged in an attempt to swindle Mr. Olney or Mr. Rankin or both; that still doesn’t give the defendant the license to murder him. We don’t have an open season on swindlers, nor do we have an open season on blackmailers.”
Judge Madison said, “The fact remains, Mr. Mason, that this painting which has been marked for identification is so far an isolated issue in the case. In other words, a witness has testified that the decedent paid him to make several paintings. But that witness said, unless I misunderstood him, that this painting was one he had been hired to make but he didn’t state specifically it was Durant who had employed him to make it. Now the defendant has testified that this painting looks like one that was hanging in the main salon of a yacht, and which Durant told her was a forgery. But we haven’t established that it is either a copy, or a forgery, or the original.”
“Exactly,” Mason said, “and I want to be able to establish exactly what it is.”
“Well, go ahead and establish it,” Judge Madison said. “For all the present testimony shows, this could be the original. It looks too good to be a copy.”
“In order to establish what it is,” Mason said, frowning thoughtfully, and apparently conceding the point reluctantly, “I would have to withdraw this witness temporarily and ask some more questions of the previous witness, Goring Gilbert.”