The Next Witness
I
I HAD HAD PREVIOUS contacts with Assistant District Attorney Irving Mandelbaum, but had never seen him perform in a courtroom. That morning, watching him at the chore of trying to persuade a jury to clamp it on Leonard Ashe for the murder of Marie Willis, I thought he was pretty good and might be better when he had warmed up. A little plump and a little short, bald in front and big-eared, he wasn’t impressive to look at, but he was businesslike and self-assured without being cocky, and he had a neat trick of pausing for a moment to look at the jury as if he half expected one of them to offer a helpful suggestion. When he pulled it, not too often, his back was turned to the judge and the defense counsel, so they couldn’t see his face, but I could, from where I sat in the audience.
It was the third day of the trial, and he had called his fifth witness, a scared-looking little guy with a pushed-in nose who gave his name, Clyde Bagby, took the oath, sat down, and fixed his scared brown eyes on Mandelbaum as if he had abandoned hope.
Mandelbaum’s tone was reassuring. “What is your business, Mr. Bagby?”
The witness swallowed. “I’m the president of Bagby Answers Ink.”
“By ‘Ink’ you mean ‘Incorporated’?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you own the business?”
“I own half the stock that’s been issued, and my wife owns the other half.”
“How long have you been operating that business?”
“Five years now-nearly five and a half.”
“And what is the business? Please tell the jury about it.”
Bagby’s eyes went left for a quick, nervous glance at the jury box but came right back to the prosecutor. “It’s a telephone-answering business, that’s all. You know what that is.”
“Yes, but some members of the jury may not be familiar with the operation. Please describe it.”
The witness licked his lips. “Well, you’re a person or a firm or an organization and you have a phone, but you’re not always there and you want to know about calls that come in your absence. So you go to a telephone-answering service. There are several dozen of them in New York, some of them spread all over town with neighborhood offices, big operations. My own operation, Bagby Answers Ink, it’s not so big because I specialize in serving individuals, houses and apartments, instead of firms or organizations. I’ve got offices in four different exchange districts-Gramercy, Plaza, Trafalgar, and Rhinelander. I can’t work it from one central office because-”
“Excuse me, Mr. Bagby, but we won’t go into technical problems. Is one of your offices at six- eighteen East Sixty-ninth Street, Manhattan?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Describe the operation at that address.”
“Well, that’s my newest place, opened only a year ago, and my smallest, so it’s not in an office building, it’s an apartment-on account of the labor law. You can’t have women working in an office building after two a.m. unless it’s a public service, but I have to give my clients all-night service, so there on Sixty-ninth Street I’ve got four operators for the three switchboards, and they all live right there in the apartment. That way I can have one at the boards from eight till two at night, and another one from two o’clock on. After nine in the morning three are on, one for each board, for the daytime load.”
“Are the switchboards installed in one of the rooms of the apartment?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell the jury what one of them is like and how it works.”
Bagby darted another nervous glance at the jury box and went back to the prosecutor. “It’s a good deal like any board in a big office, with rows of holes for the plugs. Of course it’s installed by the telephone company, with the special wiring for connections with my clients’ phones. Each board has room for sixty clients. For each client there’s a little light and a hole and a card strip with the client’s name. When someone dials a client’s number his light goes on and a buzz synchronizes with the ringing of the client’s phone. How many buzzes the girl counts before she plugs in depends on what client it is. Some of them want her to plug in after three buzzes, some want her to wait longer. I’ve got one client that has her count fifteen buzzes. That’s the kind of specialized individualized service I give my clients. The big outfits, the ones with tens of thousands of clients, they won’t do that. They’ve commercialized it. With me every client is a special case and a sacred trust.”
“Thank you, Mr. Bagby.” Mandelbaum swiveled his head for a swift sympathetic smile at the jury and swiveled it back again. “But I wasn’t buzzing for a plug for your business. When a client’s light shows on the board, and the girl has heard the prescribed number of buzzes, she plugs in on the line, is that it?”
I thought Mandelbaum’s crack was a little out of place for that setting, where a man was on trial for his life, and turned my head right for a glance at Nero Wolfe to see if he agreed, but one glimpse of his profile told me that he was sticking to his role of a morose martyr and so was in no humor to agree with anyone or anything.
That was to be expected. At that hour of the morning, following his hard-and-fast schedule, he would have been up in the plant rooms on the roof of his old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street, bossing Theodore for the glory of his celebrated collection of orchids, even possibly getting his hands dirty. At
