The Escape of Mr. Trimm Part 18

"No, sir. I wouldn't wish to ask the captain anything."

"Are there any other witnesses?" inquired Donohue next.

There was no answer. Plainly there were no other witnesses.

"Lieutenant Weil, do you desire for to say something in your own behalf?" queried the deputy commissioner.

"I think I'd like to," answered Weil.

He stood to be sworn, took the chair Meagher vacated and sat facing the room, appearing--so La Farge thought--more shamefaced and abashed than ever.

"Now, then," commanded Donohue impressively, "what statement, if any, have you to make, Lieutenant Weil, touchin' on this here charge preferred by your superior officer?"

Weil cleared his throat. Rogers figured that this bespoke embarra.s.sment; but, to the biased understanding of the hostile La Farge, there was something falsely theatrical even in the way Weil cleared his throat.

"Once a grandstander always a grandstander!" he muttered derisively.

"What did you say?" whispered Rogers.

"Nothing," replied La Farge--"just thinking out loud. Listen to what Foxy Issy has to say for himself."

"Well, sir, commissioner," began the accused, "this here thing happens last Thursday, just as Captain Meagher is telling you." He had slipped already into the policeman's trick of detailing a past event in the present tense.

"It's late in the afternoon--round five o'clock I guess--and I'm downstairs in the Detective Bureau alone."

"Alone, you say?" broke in Donohue, emphasizing the word as though the admission scored a point against the man on trial.

"Yes, sir, I'm alone. It happens that everybody else is out and I'm in temporary charge, as you might say. It's getting along toward dark when Patrolman Morgan, who's on duty out in the hall, comes in and says to me there's a woman outside who can't talk English and he can't make out what she wants. So I tells him to bring her in. She comes in. Right away I see she's a Ginney--an Italian," he corrected himself hurriedly.

"She's got a child with her--a little boy about two years old."

"Describe this here woman!" ordered Donohue, who loved to drag in details at a trial, not so much for the sake of the details themselves as to show his skill as a cross-examiner.

"Well, sir," complied Weil, "I should say she's about twenty-five years old. It's hard to tell about those Italian women, but I should say she's about twenty-five--or maybe twenty-six. She's got no figure at all and she's dressed poor. But she's got a pretty face--big brown eyes and----"

"That will do," interrupted the deputy commissioner--"that will do for that. I take it you're not qualifyin' here for a beauty expert, Lieutenant Weil!" he added with elaborate sarcasm.

"You asked me about her looks, sir," parried Weil defensively, "and I'm just trying to tell you."

"Proceed! Proceed!" bade Donohue, rumbling his consonants.

"Yes, sir. Well, in regard to this woman: She's talking so fast I can't figure out at first what she's trying to tell me. It's Italian she's talking--or I should say the kind of Italian they talk in parts of Sicily. After a little I begin to see what she's driving at. It seems she's the wife of one Antonio Terranova and her name is Maria Terranova. And after I get her straightened out and going slow she tells me her story."

"Is this here story got a bearin' on the charges pendin'?"

"I think it has. Yes, sir; it helps to explain what happens. As near as I can make out she comes from some small town down round Messina somewhere, and the way she tells it to me, her husband leaves there not long after they're married and comes over here to New York to get work, and when he gets enough money saved up ahead he's going to send back for her. That's near about three years ago. So she stays behind waiting for him, and in about four months after he leaves the baby is born--the same baby that she brings in here to headquarters with her last Thursday. She says neither one of them thinks it'll be long before he can save up money for her pa.s.sage, but it seems like he has the bad luck. He's sick for a while after he lands, and then when he gets a job in a construction gang the padrone takes the most of what he makes. And just about the time he gets a little saved up some other Ginney--Italian--in the construction camp steals it off of him.

"So he's up against it, and after a while he gets desperate. So he joins in with a Black Hander gang--amateurs operating up in the Bronx--and the very first trick he helps turn he does well by it. His share is near about a hundred dollars, and he sends her the best part of it to bring her and the baby over. She don't know at the time, though, how he raises all this money--so she tells me. And I think, at that, she's telling the truth--she ain't got sense enough to lie, I think. Anyway it sounds truthful to me--the way she tells it to me here last Thursday night."

"Proceed!" prompted Donohue testily.

"So she takes this here money and buys herself a steerage ticket and comes over here with the baby. That, as near as I can figure out, is about three months ago. She's not seen this husband of hers for going on three years--of course the baby's never seen him. And she figures he'll be at the dock to meet her. But he's not there. But his cousin is there--another Italian from the same town. He gets her through Ellis Island somehow and he takes her up to where he's living--up in the Bronx--and tells her the reason her husband ain't there to meet her. The reason is, he's at Sing Sing, doing four years.

"It seems that after he's sent her this pa.s.sage money the husband gets to thinking Black Handing is a pretty soft way to make a living, especially compared to day laboring, and he tries to raise a stake single-handed. He writes a Black Hand letter to an Italian grocer he knows has got money laid by, only the grocer is foxy and goes to the Tremont Avenue Station and shows the letter. They rig up a plant and this here Antonio Terranova walks into it. He's caught with the marked bills on him. So just the week before she lands he takes a plea in General Sessions and the judge gives him four years. When she gets to where she's telling me that part of it she starts crying.

"Well, anyway, that's the situation--him up there at Sing Sing doing his four years and her down here in New York with the kid on her hands. And she don't ever see him again, either, because in about three or four weeks--something like that--he's working with a gang in the rock quarry across the river, where they're building the new cell house, and a chunk of slate falls down and kills him and two others."

"Right here and now," interrupted the third deputy commissioner, "I want to know what's all this here stuff got to do with these here charges and specifications?"

"Just a minute, please. I'm coming to that right away, commissioner,"

protested the accused lieutenant with a sort of glib nervous agility; yet for all of his promising, he paused for a little bit before he continued. And this pause, brief enough as it was, gave the listening La Farge time to discover, with a small inward jar of surprise, that somehow, some way, he was beginning to lose some of his acrid antagonism for Weil; that, by mental processes which as yet he could not exactly resolve into their proper const.i.tuents, it was beginning to dribble away from him. And realization came to him, almost with a shock, that the man on the stand was telling the truth. Truth or not, though, the narrative thus far had been commonplace enough--people at headquarters hear the like of it often; and as a seasoned police reporter La Farge's emotions by now should be coated over with a calloused sh.e.l.l inches deep and hard as horn. Trying with half his mind to figure out what it was that had quickened these emotions, he listened all the harder as Weil went on.

"So this here big chunk of rock or slate or whatever it was falls on him and the two others and kills them. Not knowing where to send the body, they bury it up there at Sing Sing, and she never sees him again, living or dead. But here just a few days ago it seems she picks up, from overhearing some of the other Italians talking, that we've got such a thing as a Rogues' Gallery down here at headquarters and that her husband's picture is liable to be in it. So that's why she's here. She's found her way here somehow and she asks me won't I"--he caught himself--"won't the police please give her her husband's picture out of the gallery."

"And for why did she want that?" rumbled Donohue.

"That's what I asks her myself. It seems she's got no shame about it at all. She tells me she wants to hang on to it until she can get the money to have it enlarged into a big picture, and then she's going to keep it--till the bambino--that's Italian for baby, commissioner, you know--till the baby grows up, so he can see what his dead father looked like."

Now of a sudden La Farge knew--or thought he knew--why his interest had stirred in him a minute before. Instinctively his reporter's sixth sense had scented a good news story before the real point of the story had come out, even. A curious little silence had fallen on the half-lighted, almost empty big room. Only the voice of Weil broke this silence:

"Of course, commissioner, I tries to explain to her what the circ.u.mstances are. I tells her that, in the first place, on account of the mayor's orders about cutting down the gallery having gone into effect, it's an even bet her husband's picture ain't there anyhow--that it's most likely been destroyed; and in the second place, even if it is there, I tells her I've got no right to be giving it to her without an order from somebody higher up. But either she can't understand or she won't. I guess my being in uniform makes her think I'm running the whole department, and she won't seem to listen to what I says.

"She cries and she carries on worse than ever, and begs and begs me to give it to her. I guess you know how excitable those Italian women can be, especially when they are Sicilians. Anyhow, commissioner, after a lot of that sort of thing I tells her to wait where she is for a minute.

I leaves her and I goes across into the Bertillon room, where the pictures are, and I looks up this here Antonio Terranova. I forget his number now and I don't know how it is he comes to be overlooked when we're cleaning out the gallery; but he's there all right, full face and side view, with his gallery number in big white figures on his chest.

And, commissioner, he's a pretty tolerable tough-looking Ginney." The witness checked an inclination to grin. "I takes a slant at his picture, and I can't make up my own mind which way he'll look the worst enlarged into a crayon portrait--full face or side view. I can still hear her crying outside the door. She's crying harder than ever.

"I puts the picture back, and I goes out to where she is and tries to argue with her. It's no use. She goes down on her knees and holds the baby up, and tells me it ain't for her sake she's asking this--it's for the bambino. And she calls on a lot of Italian saints that I never even heard the names of some of them before--and so on, like that. It's pretty tough.

"She's such a stupid, ignorant thing you can't help from feeling sorry for her--n.o.body could." He hesitated a moment as though seeking for words of explanation and extenuation that were not in his regular vocabulary. "I got kids of my own, commissioner," he said suddenly, and stopped dead short for a moment. "I'm no Italian, but I got kids of my own!" he repeated, as though the fact const.i.tuted a defense.

"Well, well--what happened then?" The deputy commissioner's frosty voice seemed to have frozen so hard it had a crack in it. And now then the Semitic face of Weil twisted into a grin that was more than shamefaced--it was downright sheepish.

"Why, then," he said, "when I comes back out of the Bertillon room the second time she goes back down on her knees again and she says to me--of course she ain't expected to know what my religion is--maybe that explains it, commissioner--she says to me that all her life--every morning and every night--she's going to pray to the Blessed Virgin for me. That's what she says anyway. So I just lets it go at that."

He halted as though he were through.

"Then do I understand that, without an order from any superior authority, you gave this here woman certain property belonging to the Police Department?" Old Donohue's voice was gruffer than common, even.

He whetted his talon forefinger on the desk top.

"Yes, sir," owned up the Jew. "There's n.o.body there but just us two. And I don't know how Captain Meagher comes to find the picture is gone and that it was me took it--but it's true, commissioner. She goes away kissing it and holding it to the breast of her clothes--that Rogues'

Gallery picture! Yes, sir; I gives it to her."

The third deputy commissioner's gold-banded right arm was shoved out, with all the lean fingers upon the hand at the far end of it widely extended. He spoke, and something in his throat--a hard lump perhaps--husked his brogue and made his r's roll out like dice.

"Lieutenant Weil," he said, "I congratulate you! You're guilty!"