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CHAPTER IX
THE TWELFTH JUROR
TUMULTUOUSLY the session was resumed. At the door was a riot. There a squad of police fought back surging nondescripts clamoring for admission, fighting for entrance to the continuous show. A woman fainted. Another had her gown torn off. One man retired with a blackened eye.
During the recess Orr got for a moment with Sylvia and Mrs. Waldron. "Aren't you hungry?" he asked.
Sylvia took his hand and pressed it. In her eyes was victory, in her face delight. "I never knew before how Protean you are. You have won."
Orr tossed his head. "Not by a long shot. Besides, there is the jury. Eleven look imbecile and the twelfth looks ill. There is no telling at all what they will do or will not. But aren't you to eat anything?" He turned to Mrs. Waldron. "Aren't you hungry?"
"Very," said the lady, "but I can't do a thing with Sylvia. I – "
She would have said more, but the jury had filed in. The judge was entering, preceded by the cry "Hats off!"
Orr slipped back to his corner, to which Annandale, with his matinee air and the keeper for usher, had already returned. For a moment Orr bent to him, then to his associates but briefly. Bending again to Annandale he told him to take the stand.
The move, wholly unexpected, unusual, almost exceptional in murder cases, created an impression that was excellent, a sense of admiration for the fearlessness of the defense. From the prosecution came low growls of content. They were to be fed at last. In anticipation they licked their chops.
But the excellence of the impression dwindled. In the direct, Annandale denied, of course, that he had committed the murder, denied that he had ever contemplated it, swearing that to the best of his recollection he had made no threat at all.
"To the best of your recollection," Orr repeated after him. "Now please tell me, had anything occurred that night to impair your memory in any way?"
"Well – er – yes. Yes. I had been drinking."
"Had you any animosity toward the deceased?"
"Toward Loftus? None whatever. On the contrary, he was my best friend."
Peacock jumped. "I ask that that be stricken out."
Quietly Orr continued: "Had you known Loftus long?"
"All my life."
"Was he a friend of yours?"
"An intimate friend."
Orr turned to Peacock. "Your witness."
Peacock jumped again. "You say that on the night of the murder you had been drinking. Were you drunk?"
Paternally the Recorder looked over and down. "The witness need not answer that unless – "
Annandale interrupted him. "I am much obliged to Your Honor, but really I have nothing to conceal. I was drunk, deplorably so."
"Habit of yours, is it?" Peacock snapped.
Annandale took a monocle from a pocket, screwed it in his eye, looked through it at Peacock, smiled at him, with an air of fathomless good fellowship, answered: "Dear me, no. Is it one of yours?"
"Oho!" cried Peacock, pocketing the insult but pouncing at the point, "you were drunk on this occasion only. Got drunk for it, did you?"
"No," Annandale blandly and confidentially replied. "You see, don't you know, it was the day of the panic. I had dropped a good lot of money – a good lot, I mean, for me – and, as the saying is, I tried to drown my sorrows."
"But you found that they could swim, didn't you? Now, tell me, among these sorrows was not the greatest the one to which your former butler has testified, your late wife's desire for a divorce in order that she might marry Loftus? Is it not a fact that she told you so, and that you then said, 'I'll kill him, I'll kill Royal Loftus like the dog that he is'?"
"I recall no such conversation."
"What, then, was the nature of the conversation that passed between you and your wife on this particular evening?"
"I don't remember."
"The conversation and the threat to which your butler has sworn may therefore have occurred without your now recalling it. Is that not so?"
"Everything is possible, you know," Annandale answered with a phrase unconsciously borrowed of Orr. "But I doubt it very much for the reason – "
"Here," interrupted Peacock. "I don't want your doubts or your reasons or your haha airs. I want answers from you, direct answers. Where did you go and what did you do after your threat?"
To this Orr objected. A wrangle ensued. Orr was sustained. Peacock reconstructed his question. Annandale answered that he had gone to Miss Waldron's, but that he remembered nothing else.
"Is this yours?" Peacock suddenly asked, producing the pistol marked exhibit A.
"Probably," said Annandale, looking, not at it, but at the ceiling.
"That's all."
Annandale got from the stand. Others succeeded him there, experts for the defense, men who recited their qualities and degrees as though they were eating truffles to the sound of trumpets. One after another they testified that liquor can ablate memory partially, wholly; can ablate it regarding events antecedent and subsequent to a rememorated point between; can, moreover, leave the subject in a condition apparently normal yet actually in a state of trance.
"Do you really regard these people as experts?" Peacock with pitying contempt asked of Orr. Then at once in rebuttal were other experts, equally pleased with themselves, humorously disposing of psychical epilepsy, affecting to regard it as a medicolegal myth. Among the spectators the usual jest circulated. The mendacious were subdivided into liars, damned liars, expert witnesses. Yet there you were. But not Orr. Tortuously he involved the deponents in helpful contradictions, smiling at them, at Peacock and the jury, smiling with an air of saying "You see what confounded idiots these imbeciles are."
But the session was closing. One more witness remained to be called.
"Miss Waldron, will you take the stand?"
With the charming manner of the thoroughbred New York girl Sylvia circled the room. It was refreshing to see her, refreshing to hear the way in which she corroborated what Annandale had said.
"But," objected Peacock, "you had just gone from his house; what did he go to yours for?"
"To restore a string of pearls."
"Did he repeat to you anything that he had said to his wife?"
"Had he attempted to I should have refused to listen."
"Was he drunk?"
"I cannot say. I have never seen anyone in that condition."
"Did he make any threats regarding Loftus?"
"A gentleman does not make threats."
"Miss Waldron, I will thank you to answer me directly. Did he or did he not?"
"He did not."
"You swear to that?"
"I do."
It was perjury, of course. Yet if a girl may not perjure herself like a lady for the man she loves things have come to a pretty pass. That idea apparently struck Peacock.
"Prior to the defendant's marriage you were engaged to him, were you not?"
"I was."
"Are you engaged to him now?"
Very prettily and gracefully, without embarrassment, rather with pride, Sylvia answered: "I am."
"That's all," said Peacock. "The State rests." But as he said it he looked at the jury and sighed, sighed audibly, much as were he adding, "You may judge the value of her testimony from that."
The resting, however, was but figurative. In a moment the summing up began, a summing which, at first passionless as algebra, dealt with technical points.
"Gentlemen," said Peacock turning again to the jury, "the evidence in this case is of the kind known to you perhaps as circumstantial. Evidence of this nature can lead and often does lead to a conclusion more satisfactory than direct evidence can produce. Circumstances cannot lie any more than facts can. Unless we resort to them it is in vain that we attempt to detect and to punish crime. Crime shuns the light of day. It seeks darkness. It courts secrecy. The assassin moves stealthily. He calls no witness to see him shoot his victim down. If you wait for an eye-witness you grant impunity to crime. It is true, and probably you will be so told by counsel for the defense, that there are cases in which the innocent have been convicted. Yet if men have been erroneously convicted on circumstantial evidence, so have they been convicted on direct testimony also. That is not, though, a reason for declining to accept such testimony. The possibility of error exists alike. But because men may err do they refuse to act? Because wheat may be blighted does the farmer refuse to sow? No, gentlemen. Until we have means of knowledge beyond our present faculties we must accept this kind of evidence or grant practical immunity to crime."
The exordium concluded, Peacock warmed to his work. What he said he seemed to literally tear from his mouth. It was an arraignment not delivered but hurled, headlong, with the force and rush of a cavalry charge. Before it Orr's points sank overwhelmed. To replace them with others of his own Peacock made new ones, evolving them with a fire and lucidity that was pyrotechnic. They were like bombs exploding before the jury's eyes. He arraigned the defendant, arraigned the defense, stampeded their tactics, denounced Annandale's manner, which he declared to be that of a hardened criminal, and pictured him as a jealous husband who, in accordance with a plot long premeditated, had first lured his victim to his house, then following him thence had murdered him in the darkness, but who now swore that he was drunk and remembered nothing. "Assuming that he was drunk," Peacock shouted, "his intoxication was a feigned disguise, assumed for the purpose and legally an aggravation of his dastard crime."
Beneath, in the unlovely street, an organ was tossing a jig. The jolts of it mounted to the court, fusing with Peacock's voice, adding their vulgarity to his own, and it was to the wretchedness of them that he said at last: "My duty is done."
He had scored points by the dozen. In as many seconds Orr had their heads off by half.
"Harris, gentlemen, is the rock of the People's case. His hand fashioned it. Without him it crumbles. Let me array for you Harris against Harris."
Leisurely Orr began, showing the man's hand for what it was, not dirty and disreputable merely, but discredited.
"Apart from that hand where is the promised evidence? Where is it? Where is that evidence? Gentlemen, not a bit of evidence have you had, not a molecule, not a minim, not a mite. At best or at worst any evidence producible against this defendant would be circumstantial. In telling you the value of such testimony the District Attorney has been good enough to leave it to me to explain that testimony of this character must, to be conclusive, exclude every other reasonable hypothesis. The District Attorney has further told you that circumstances cannot lie. Of all his statements that one and that one alone is correct. Circumstances cannot lie. But witnesses can. It is from them that circumstances are obtained. And though they furnish a million circumstances, what are these circumstances worth if they themselves are unsound? How unsound that reptile Harris is, you have, I believe, been enabled to judge. But even otherwise, even though the testimony of that saurian seem to you probable, I may remind you that the most probable things often prove false, for the reason that if they were exempt from falsity they would cease to be probable; they would be certain.
"Now what certainty has the District Attorney brought you? Instead of excluding every other reasonable hypothesis, he has opened the door to a dozen hypotheses infinitely more reasonable than his own. Except that the obligatory instrument does not appear to have been found, he has adduced nothing to show that the deceased did not commit suicide. He has adduced nothing to show that he was not robbed. The caretaker has testified that he was away from the park ten or fifteen minutes. The policeman who returned with him has testified that when he got there the gate was open. In the interim anyone may have entered, gone through the suicide, bagged his pistol for further booty and away.
"No, the District Attorney has not excluded these hypotheses, he has confined himself to picturing this defendant as a husband jealous of the deceased. But assuming that he was, how many other husbands may not have been jealous of him also? The bullet in evidence, the bullet extracted from the brain of the deceased, is one which, from a calculation of its lands and grooves, may or may not have come from a thirty-two calibre pistol. Anyway a thirty-two calibre pistol is among the exhibits. But how many more such pistols are there in this great city? The ownership of one is not a proof of crime. Nor is the fact that the body of the deceased was found in front of this defendant's residence proof either. On the contrary. The park wherein it lay is a parallelogram, and a body in it would be practically in front of every other house in the square. How many jealous husbands reside in these houses I am not competent to say, but I am competent to tell you that the prosecution might just as well have arraigned any other resident there as this defendant; yes, and better, were it not for Harris."
Orr paused. "Reptile," he cried. "Knave, fraud, thief, liar – "
But the Court admonished him that his time was up. Without a murmur, in the middle of a sentence, he sat down. It was another point that he had scored.
"Gentlemen – "
The Recorder's charge to the jury followed, a charge clear, undeclamatory, without literature or bias, in which they were instructed regarding the law and left to determine the facts.
The jury filed out. The Recorder evaporated. Annandale sauntered away. Into adjacent corridors the great room emptied itself.
Orr, stationing associates on guard, went over to Sylvia, urging her to go.
But Sylvia refused at first to budge. The jury, she declared, would be back in five minutes.
"It may be five hours," said Orr. "You had far better go home. No? Well then I will take you to my offices and have something brought in."
"Is it far?" Sylvia warily asked. But presently she assented, stipulating however that Annandale should be brought there the moment he was freed.
Orr tossed his head. "That may not be for years, until after an appeal. I have not an idea what the jury will do. But I know one thing: the last of the lot, the twelfth, looked at me during my summing up with something that was a cross between a sneer and a scowl."
"Yes," Mrs. Waldron interjected, "I noticed him. But it seemed to me that he was not listening. It seemed to me that he was in pain. But do, Sylvia, let us go. It is cruel of you. I am starving."
In Orr's neighborly offices shortly the lady was fed. Sylvia too ate something. Orr himself would have bolted a bite, but he had to hurry away, though promising as he did so everything that Sylvia asked, promising to stand on his head if she wished it.
Once back in the court he found it still empty. In the corridors reporters and idlers lounged, speculating on the verdict, prophesying that the deliberations of the jury would be brief. But time limped. An hour passed, two hours, three. Enervated and empty Orr went down and out to a little restaurant across the street. Presently it was reported that the jury were coming in. Orr hurried back, but however he hurried, he was late. The court had refilled. As he entered he heard someone say:
"Not guilty."
Abruptly the room hummed like a wasps' nest. There were raps for order, commands for silence, threatened punishments for contempt.
The hubbub subsided, the Recorder thanked and dismissed the jury. He turned to Peacock. "Are there any further charges against the prisoner?"
"There are none, Your Honor."
The Recorder nodded at Annandale. "You are discharged."
Orr tried to get at him. But at that moment the crowd interfered. In making a circuit to reach Annandale, he found himself among the departing jury. They had all left the box, all save the twelfth, who apparently had stumbled.
About them reporters circled. The foreman was relating that they had been practically unanimous for conviction, but that one of them, the twelfth, had insisted so obstinately on the poverty of the evidence that with him finally they had voted to acquit.
"But where is he?" the foreman interrupted himself to ask. "Where is the twelfth juror? Where is Durand?"
Then only was it seen that he was still in the box, crouching there, his face ashen where it was not violet, a hand held to his side.
In a moment he was surrounded. To those nearest he looked and gasped.
"Give him some brandy," a reporter suggested. But now into the little group Peacock had forced his way. Orr edged nearer.
The juror gasped again. "I am dying," he groaned. "It is my heart. Send for a priest. I killed him. I am the man."
Skeptically Peacock sniffed. "You killed whom?"
"He is delirious," the reporter exclaimed.
"I killed him," Durand repeated.
"But whom? And why?" Peacock, bending a bit, impressed in spite of himself, inquired.
Slowly, laboriously, painfully at that, Durand from a pocket drew a picture.
"Curse him," he muttered. "There he is. He disgraced my perle, my daughter Marie, but she wrote me where to find him and I did; I found him in the park and I shot him there, through the head, through the h-head," he stammered and clutched at his heart.
From his hand the picture had slipped. Orr edged closer, stooped for it, recovered it, then in heightening wonder stared. The picture was a colored photograph that displayed the chiseled features, wonderful eyes and thin black mustache of one whom he had known. Above it was written "Marie's Husband."
"It is Loftus," he exclaimed.
Peacock wheeled. "Loftus," he cried. Instantly to question further, he turned to the juror again.
But even as he turned he saw that the trial was over. Spasmodically the man's mouth had twitched, his head had fallen; before a higher court he had gone.
Peacock, the marvel of it upon him, turned anew to Orr. Foes while the battle was raging, the two men now were like the commandants of opposing forces who, the conflict ended, meet and embrace.
Peacock rubbed his eyes. "What this confession means, Orr, you as well as I appreciate." Instinctively his voice had sunk into that undertone which Death, when it comes, exacts. "Yes," he continued, "Annandale is not merely acquitted, he is cleared. For that, believe me, I am glad. As for Loftus, he got from that dead father only what he deserved."
To this Orr, about whom the marvel of it all still also clung, assented. "Justice," he replied, "is rarely human, but sometimes it is divine."
He would have said more perhaps, but Annandale was approaching. Obviously the latter was as yet wholly unaware of this new climax to his case. He was looking doubtfully around.
"I can't find my hat," he announced. Then at once, detecting the unusual in the attitude of those that stood about, his eyes followed theirs to the box from which court officers, long trained to the lugubrious, swiftly and silently were removing the corpse.
A keeper appeared. In his hand was the hat. Annandale took it, his eyes still following the body that was being removed.
"There," said Orr abruptly, "there is the man that killed Loftus. But come," he added. "Sylvia is waiting. Good-bye, Peacock. We have both had a lesson in presumptive proof."
Astonishment lifted Annandale visibly like a flash. "What!" he exclaimed. "What! What's all this?"
Then Orr, a hand on his arm, led him away, and as they passed from the General Sessions, told him what had occurred.
CHAPTER X
THE VERDICT
IN the days of the Doges there was a Gold Book in which the First Families of Venice shone. In New York there is also a Gold Book, unprinted but otherwise familiar. The names that appear there have earned the cataloguing not from medieval prowess, but from money's more modish might.
At the Metropolitan Opera House, two years and a fraction after the trial, the Gold Bookers were on view – men who could have married the Adriatic, dowered her too, whose signatures were potenter than kings. There also were women fairer than the young empresses of old Rome, maidens in thousand-dollar frocks, matrons coroneted and tiaraed. On the grand tier they sat, a family-party air about them, nodding to each other, exhaling orris, talking animatedly about nothing at all. Into their boxes young men strolled, lolled awhile, sauntered away.
In one of these boxes was Sylvia, looking like an angel, only, of course, much better dressed. Behind her was Annandale. They were quite an old couple. They had been married fully a year. In the box with them was Orr.
On the stage a festival was in progress, a festival for ear and eye, the apogee of Italian art, a production of "Aïda." A quarter of a century and more ago when that opera was first given in Cairo, there was an accompanying splendor more lavish than it, or any other opera, has had since. But it was difficult to fancy that even then there was a better cast. Before the tenor had completed the opening romanza he had enthralled the house. Good-looking, as tenors should be, stout as tenors are, he suggested Mario resurrected and returned.
"Celeste Aïda!" he sang, and it was celestial. Then at once Amneris, enacted by a debutante, appeared and the house was treated to what it had not had since Scalchi was in her prime, a voice with a conservatory in the upper register, a cavern in the lower and, strewn between, rich loops of light, of opals, flowers, kisses and stars.
Princess she was and looked, yet, despite the glory of her raiment, rather a princess in a drawing-room than the daughter of a Pharaoh in a Memphian crypt. She seemed pleased, sure of her charm, and she pleased and charmed at sight. The house, the most apathetic – save Covent Garden – in the world, and, musically, the most ignorant as well, rose to her.
Sylvia turned to Orr. In his gloved hand was a program. "What a dear!" she murmured. "Who is she?"
Orr, before answering, looked at Annandale. The latter's eyes were on the roof. He may have been drinking the song, unconscious of the singer. But it is more probable that his thoughts were elsewhere, though hardly in the Tombs, where, during his relatively brief sojourn, he had lived at the relatively reasonable rate of a hundred dollars a day.
"A debutante," Orr answered. "She is billed as Dellarandi."
The curtain fell. The box was invaded. Men indebted to Mrs. Annandale for dinner, or who hoped to be, dropped in. Orr got up and went out.
The second act began. There was an alternating chorus. During it Amneris sat mirroring her beauty in a glass. Presently her voice mounted, mounting as mounts a bird and higher. She was joining in the incomparable duo that ensues. It passed. A march, blown from Egyptian trumpets, followed, preluding the dance of priestesses which precedes the tenor's return. As that progressed the leader of the orchestra shook like an epileptic. From his own musicians, from those on the stage, from chorus and singers, he drew wave after wave of melody, a full sea of transcendent accords that bathed Sylvia with harmony, filtered through her, penetrating blissfully from fingertips to spine.
Delightedly she turned to Annandale. The visitors had gone. Orr was entering. In his bulldog face was an expression vatic and amused.
"Yes," he resumed, seating himself at Sylvia's side, "she is billed as Dellarandi, but I knew her as Marie Leroy."
Sylvia started, her lips half parted, her eyes dilated with surprise.
Annandale bent forward. "What is it?" he asked.
"Amneris, the contralto. Do you know who she is?"
"I know she is a devilish pretty woman. What about her?"
"She is the girl whose father was the twelfth juror in your case."
Annandale, who had been standing, literally dropped with astonishment in a chair. But Sylvia was insatiable. She could not ask enough, she could not get the answers quickly enough in reply. Orr, however, knew very little, odds and ends merely that he gathered in the lobby, summarily that the girl had married Tambourini, the music teacher, and was regarded as destined to be one of the great queens of song.
So interested were all three that the third act was barely noticed. It took the melting beauty of the final duo to distract them from the debutante. But the witchery of that aria would distract a moribund. It was with the bewildering loveliness of it in their ears that they moved out from the box.
"Terra addio!" Orr repeated from it as they descended the stair.
"No, not addio," said Sylvia; "that poor girl may have said farewell to many hopes, but there are other and better ones for her now. I feel that she must have suffered terribly, and because of that suffering we should acquit her of what she did."
"That is the verdict, is it?" said Orr.
"That is my verdict," Sylvia answered. Then touching Annandale's arm she looked up at him and added, "It is yours, too, dear, is it not?"
