The Escape of Mr. Trimm

Indeed, there was a visible air of self-abasement about Lieutenant Weil as he crossed the wide chamber. It was a thing hard to define in words; yet undeniably there was a diffidence and a reluctance manifest in him, as though a sense of guilt wrestled with the man's natural conceit and assurance.

“Rogers,” said La Farge, “let's hustle out and 'phone in what we've got and then come back right away. If this fellow's going to get the harpoon stuck into him I want to be on hand when he starts bleeding.”

Only a few of the dwindled crowd turned back to hear the beginning of the case, whatever it might be, against the Jew. The rest scattered through the corridors, heading mainly for the exits, so that the two newspaper men had company as they hurried toward the main door, making for their offices across the street. When they came back the long cross halls were almost deserted; it had taken them a little longer to finish the job of telephoning than they had figured. At the door of the trial room stood one bulky blue figure. It was the acting bailiff.

“How far along have they got?” asked La Farge as the policeman made way for them to pass in.

“Captain Meagher is the first witness,” said the policeman. “He's the one that's makin' the charge.”

“What is the charge?” put in Rogers.

“At this distance I couldn't make out—Cap Meagher, he mumbles so,” confessed the doorkeeper. “Somethin' about misuse of police property, I take it to be.”

“Aha!” gloated La Farge in his gratification. “Come on, Rogers—I don't want to miss any of this.”

It was plain, however, that they had missed something; for, to judge by his attitude, Captain Meagher was quite through with his testimony. He still sat in the witness chair alongside the deputy commissioner's desk; but he was silent and he stared vacantly at vacancy. Captain Meagher was known in the department as a man incredibly honest and unbelievably dull. He had no more imagination than one of his own reports. He had a long, sad face, like a tired workhorse's, and heavy black eyebrows that curved high in the middle and arched downward at each end—circumflexes accenting the incurable stupidity of his expression. His black mustache drooped the same way, too, in the design of an inverted magnet. Larry Magee had coined one of his best whimsies on the subject of the shape of the captain's mustache.

“No wonder,” he said, “old Meagher never has any luck—he wears his horseshoe upside down on his face!”

Just as the two reporters, re-entering, took their seats the trial deputy spoke.

“Is that all, Captain Meagher?” he asked sonorously.

“That's all,” said Meagher.

“I note,” went on Donohue, glancing about him, “that the accused does not appear to be represented by counsel.”

A man on trial at headquarters has the right to hire a lawyer to defend him.

“No, sir,” spoke up Weil briskly. “I've got no lawyer, commissioner.” His speech was the elaborated and painfully emphasized English of the self-taught East Sider. It carried in it just the bare suggestion of the racial lisp, and it made an acute contrast to the menacing Hibernian purr of Donohue's heavier voice. “I kind of thought I'd conduct my own case myself.”

Donohue merely grunted.

“Do you desire, Lieutenant Weil, for to ask Captain Meagher any questions?” he demanded.

Weil shook his oily head of hair.

“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 embarrassment; 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 passage, 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 passage 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 constituents, 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 shell 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.”