“Did you know Mrs. Bellamy by name at that time?”
“No, sir; I found out later. That’s when I learned where her house was too.”
“Was yours the first bus that she could have caught?”
“If she missed the eight o’clock bus. Mine was the next.”
“Did anything particularly draw your attention to her?”
“Yes, sir. She had her face all muffled up in her veil, the way she always did, but I specially noticed her slippers. They were awfully pretty shiny silver slippers, and when I let her out at the corner before Orchards it was sort of muddy, and I thought they sure were foolish little things to walk in, but that it was a terrible pity to spoil ’em like that.”
“How long did it take you to cover the distance between the point from which you picked Mrs. Bellamy up to the point at which you set her down?”
“About eight minutes, I should say. It’s a little over two miles—nearer two and a half, I guess.”
“Did she seem in a hurry?”
“Yes, sir, she surely did; when she got out at the Orchards corner she started off almost at a run. I pretty nearly called to her to look out or she’d trip herself, but then I decided that it wasn’t none of my business, and of course it wasn’t.”
“How do you fix the date and the time, Turner?”
“Well, that’s easy. It was my last trip that night to Perrytown, see? And about the date, next morning I saw how there had been the—a—well, a murder at Orchards, and I remembered her and those silver slippers, and that black cloak, so I dropped in at headquarters to tell ’em what I knew—and it was her all right. They made me go over and look at her, and I won’t forget that in a hurry, either—no, sir.”
The boy who had driven her to Orchards set his lips hard, turning his eyes resolutely from the little black cloak. “I got ’em to change my route the next day,” he said, his pleasant young voice suddenly shaken.
“You say that you had driven her over several times before?”
“Well, two or three times, I guess—all in that last month too. I only had the route a month.”
“Same time—half-past eight?”
“That’s right—eight-thirty.”
“Anything in particular call your attention to her?”
“Well, I should think she’d have called anyone’s attention to her,” said Joe Turner gently. “Even all wrapped up like that, she was prettier than anything I ever saw in my whole life.” And he added, more gently still: “About twenty times prettier.”
The prosecutor stood silent for a moment, letting the hushed voice evoke once more that radiant image, lace-scarfed, silver-slippered, slipping off into the shadows. “That will be all,” he said. “Cross-examine.”
“No questions.” Even Lambert’s voice boomed less roundly.
“Next witness—Sergeant Johnson.”
“Sergeant Hendrick Johnson!”
Obedient to Ben Pott’s lyric summons, a young gentleman who looked like a Norse god inappropriately clothed in gray whipcord and a Sam Browne belt strode promptly down the aisle and into the witness box.
“Sergeant Johnson, what was your occupation on the ?”
“State trooper—sergeant.”
“When did you first receive notification of the murder at Orchards?”
“At a little before ten on the morning of the . I’d just dropped in at headquarters when Mr. Conroy came in to report what he’d discovered at the cottage.”
“Please tell us what happened then.”
“I was detailed to accompany Mr. Dutton, the coroner, Dr. Stanley and another trooper, Dan Wilkins, to the cottage. Mr. Dutton took Dr. Stanley along with him in his roadster, and Wilkins rode with me in my side car. We left headquarters at a little after ten and got to the cottage about quarter past.”
“Just one moment. Do I understand that the state troopers have headquarters in Rosemont?”
“That’s correct, sir.”
“Of which you are in charge?”
“That’s correct too.”
“Who had the key to the cottage?”
“I had it; Mr. Conroy had turned it over to me. I unlocked the door of the cottage myself, and we all went in together.” The crisp, assured young voice implied that a murder more or less was all in the day’s work to the state police.
“Did you drive directly up to the cottage door?”
“No; we left the motorcycle and the car just short of the spot where the little dirt road to the cottage hits the gravel road to the main house and went in on foot, using the grass strip that edges the road.”
“Any special reason for that?”
“There certainly was. We didn’t want to mix up footprints and other marks any more than they’d been mixed already.”
“What happened after you got in the house?”
“Well, Mr. Dutton and the doctor took charge of the body, and we helped them to move it into the dining room across the hall, after a careful inspection had been made of the position of the body. As a matter of fact, a chalk outline was made of it for further analysis, if necessary, and I took a flash light or so of it so that we’d have that, too, to check up with later. I helped to carry the body to the other room and place it on the table, where it was decided to keep it until the autopsy could be performed. I then locked the door of the parlour so that nothing could be disturbed there, put the key in my pocket, and went out to inspect the marks in the dirt road. I left Mr. Dutton and Dr. Stanley with the body and sent Wilkins down the road to a gas station to telephone Mr. Bellamy that his wife had been found in the cottage. There was no telephone in the cottage, and the one at the main house had been disconnected.”
“Sergeant, was Mr. Bellamy under suspicion at the time that you telephoned him?”
“I didn’t do the telephoning,” corrected Sergeant Johnson dispassionately; and added more dispassionately still; “Everyone was under suspicion.”
“Mr. Bellamy no more than another?”
“What I said was,” remarked the
