Halfway House (13 page)

Pollinger pulled a long face. “They’ve had a field day of it.”

“There was one story by a fellow-townswoman of yours,” continued Ellery, “which I confess impressed me. I refer to the work of that charming young hoyden with the red hair who writes special features for the
Trenton Times.
”

“Ella Amity’s all right,” said De Jong indifferently.

“Oh, wake up, De Jong. That’s faint praise. The woman’s grasped something which has escaped all of you. Do you recall her sobriquet for the shack in which Gimball met his death?” The two officials looked politely blank. Bill was sucking a knuckle with absorption. “She named it,” observed Ellery, “Halfway House.”

“Halfway House.” Pollinger looked impatient. “Oh, yes.”

“It doesn’t strike sparks,” said Ellery dryly. “But it should. She put her canny finger on the very heart of the problem.”

De Jong sneered. “It sounds plain screwy to me.”

“Your loss. The phrase is a positive inspiration. Don’t you see its significance?” He exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Tell me. Whose murder are you investigating?”

“Whose—” The prosecutor sat up sharply.

“It’s a riddle,” grinned De Jong. “I’ll bite. Mickey Mouse?”

“Not bad, De Jong,” said Ellery. “I ask once more: Who has been murdered?” He waved his long fingers. “And if you can’t give him a name, it’s going to be more difficult to find his killer.”

“What are you driving at?” snapped Pollinger. “Joseph Kent Gimball, of course. Or Joseph Wilson, or Henry Smith, or any other damned name you want to call him by. We’ve got the man, the body; that’s the important thing; and we know who he is. What difference does his name make?”

“Possibly all the difference in the world. Old Shakespeare unfortunately didn’t live in the days of criminological science. You see, you don’t know. Gimball
or
Wilson—precisely. This man was Wilson in Philadelphia and Gimball in New York. He was polished off in Trenton. … Halfway House, says our Ella. Very apt indeed. Now in Halfway House, to push the conceit a little further,” continued Ellery soberly, “you found Gimball clothes and Wilson clothes, a Gimball car and a Wilson car. In Halfway House this man was
both
Gimball and Wilson, you see. And so I ask again: In what personality was the man murdered? As Gimball or as Wilson? Whom did the murderess think she was dispatching—Joseph Kent Gimball of New York or Joe Wilson of Philadelphia?”

“I never thought of it in that way,” muttered Bill. Pollinger rose and began to patrol the floor behind his desk.

De Jong jeered. “Nuts and double-nuts. Hifalutin’ stuff.”

Pollinger halted. He shot a peculiar look at Ellery from under his sparse brows. “And in what personality do
you
think he was killed?”

“That,” sighed Ellery, “is indeed the question. I can’t answer it. Can you?”

“No.” Pollinger sat down. “No, I can’t. But it seems to me to be still a purely academic question. I can’t see how… Look here.”

“Here it comes,” said Bill. His hands hung loosely between his knees, perfectly controlled. Ellery smoked calmly.

The prosecutor’s slender fingers played with a paper-cutter on his desk. “De Jong’s made a major discovery. He’s found the car used by the person who murdered Gimball Saturday night—the small car with the Firestone tires.”

Ellery glanced at Bill. It was odd how Pollinger’s simple statement affected the young man. It tightened his skin like a caustic, making it look dry and old. He sat in a lump as if he were afraid the slightest movement would precipitate an avalanche. “Well?” He cleared his throat. “Well?”

Pollinger shrugged. “Abandoned. Had an accident.”

“Where?” demanded Ellery.

“And don’t think,” drawled De Jong, “there’s any doubt about it, gents. It’s the bus, all right.”

“An Olympian utterance. How can you be certain?”

Pollinger opened the top drawer of his desk. “By reason of three quite conclusive facts.” He tossed over a bundle of photographs. “The impressions of the tires. We’ve made casts of the middle set of marks from the mud in front of the shack, and compared them with the tires of the car we found—’32 Ford, by the way, coupé, black paint job. Well, casts and tires coincide. That’s number one.”

Bill was blinking as if the green-shaded light hurt his eyes. “And number two?”

“Number two,” replied the prosecutor, putting his hand into the drawer again, “is this.” He brought out the rusty figurine of the naked woman which De Jong’s man had found in the main driveway on the night of the murder—the radiator-cap which had snapped off at the ankles of the figure. And then he placed beside it another object made of the same rust-flecked metal—the plug of the cap, with two jagged ends of metal sticking up from its top. “Examine them. You’ll find that the broken edges of the metal ankles fit exactly into the broken ends of the metal feet on the cap.”

“The cap comes from this Ford coupé?” asked Ellery intently.

“If it doesn’t,” said De Jong, “I was dreaming when I unscrewed it.”

“Of course,” continued Pollinger in an odd tone, “this is almost as sound evidence as a fingerprint. Now, number three.” For the fourth time his hand went to the drawer; when it emerged, it was swathed in some dark filmy material.

“The veil!” exclaimed Ellery; he reached for it. “Where did you find this, by thunder?”

“On the driver’s seat of the coupé.” Pollinger leaned back. “You can see how important this veil is as evidence. The tire marks and the broken radiator-cap establish the Ford as having visited the scene of the crime on Saturday evening. The veil serves to fix guilt. Found in the Ford, it sets up a reasonable presumption that the Ford was driven by the criminal. For the victim himself told Angell with his dying breath that his murderess wore a veil. And veils aren’t common these days.”

Bill was glaring at the veil. “As a lawyer,” he said hoarsely, “of course you realize that’s the frailest kind of circumstantial evidence? You haven’t connected. Where’s your eye-witness? That would be a case. Or have you checked the times involved? How do you know the car wasn’t abandoned long before the crime-period? How——”

Pollinger said slowly: “My dear young man, I know the law very well indeed.” He rose and began pacing again.

There was a knock on the door, and the thin little man whirled about. “Come in!”

Sellers, the small brown man attached to De Jong’s staff, opened the door; there was another detective behind him. The brown man seemed a little surprised at the sight of the two visitors. “Well?” barked De Jong. “Everything go off all right?”

“Fine.”

De Jong flashed a glance at Pollinger. The prosecutor nodded and turned away. Bill was gripping the arms of his chair, looking wildly from face to face. Sellers mumbled something and the other man vanished. A moment later he reappeared with his hand on the arm of Lucy Wilson. All the blood seemed permanently to have deserted her skin. There were large violet arcs under her splendid eyes. Her hands were fists and her high breasts rose and fell in surges. There was something so bedraggled and woebegone in her appearance that for a long moment no one seemed able to find his tongue. Then she said, in a weak voice: “Bill. Oh, Bill darling,” and she stumbled toward him.

Bill sprang from his chair like a catapult released. “You skunk!” he shouted at De Jong. “What the hell d’ye mean by dragging my sister down here this time of night?”

De Jong gestured to the brown man, who stepped forward and touched Bill’s arm. “Come on now, Angell. We don’t want any trouble with you.”

“Lucy.” Bill brushed the man aside. He gripped Lucy’s shoulders and shook her. “Lucy! Why did you let them bring you into New Jersey? They can’t do that. They can’t cross a State line without extradition papers!”

She whispered: “I feel so… I don’t know. Oh, Bill, they—they said Mr. Pollinger wanted to talk to me. They said—”

“You tricky shyster!” yelled Bill. “You’ve no right——”

Pollinger stalked forward with a sort of bantam dignity. He thrust something into Lucy’s hands. “Mrs. Wilson,” he asked formally, “do you recognize this automobile?”

“Don’t answer!” cried Bill.

But she said with a tired frown: “Yes. Yes, that’s my car. That’s the Ford Joe gave me for my birthday a few years ago. Joe gave me…”

“Do you still deny knowing how this car of yours happened to get out of your garage Saturday?”

“Yes. No. I mean I don’t know.”

“It was found jammed against a tree off the road in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia,” droned the prosecutor. “Not five minutes away from your home, Mrs. Wilson. Didn’t you have an accident there Saturday night—returning from Trenton?”

Something stark in the scene—the harsh green light, the standing silent men, the stiff rows of law books on the shelves, the cluttered desk—penetrated to her brain. Her nostrils quivered and perspiration sprang out on the bridge of her small nose. “No,” she whispered. “Good God, Mr. Pollinger,
no!”
Her black eyes were shiny with terror.

Pollinger picked up the dark veil. “And isn’t this black veil yours?”

She stared at it without seeing it. “What? What?”

“You won’t get anything out of her, Pollinger,” said De Jong gruffly. “She’s a smart gal. Let’s get this over with.” A clock ticked noisily away on the wall. The brown man’s clutch tightened on Lucy Wilson’s sleeve. Bill stood in a half-crouch, his fingers curved and his eyes liquid with fear.

“Gentlemen,” said Ellery sharply. “I warn you not to offer this poor woman up as a sacrifice to public opinion. Bill, be still!”

“I know my duty, Mr. Queen,” said the prosecutor stiffly. He reached for a document on his desk.

Bill shouted: “Don’t! Damn you, you can’t—”

“Lucy Wilson,” said Pollinger in a tired voice, “I hold here a warrant for your arrest. It charges you in the name of the people of New Jersey with the murder with malice aforethought of one Joseph Wilson, also known as Joseph Kent Gimball, in Mercer County, State of New Jersey, on the night of Saturday, June the first, 1935.”

The woman’s black eyes rolled over as she slid, fainting, into her brother’s arms.

“Eye me, blest Providence, and
square my trial
To my proportion’d strength.”

‘T
HE
M
ERCER
C
OUNTY
Court House in which Lucy Wilson is about to go on trial for her life, charged with the murder of her husband Joseph Wilson, otherwise Joseph Kent Gimball, prominent New York financier and social luminary,’ wrote the AP man with the flair for statistics, ‘stands on South Broad Street in Trenton near the corner of Market, a weatherbeaten stone structure adjoining the County Jail on Cooper Street where Lucy Wilson lies nursing her strength for the epic struggle to come.

‘The chamber in which her brother, Attorney William Angell of Philadelphia, will begin her legal defense on Monday morning against the accusations of the State of New Jersey lies at the north end of the building on the second floor in Room 207, housing the Court of Common Pleas where murder trials in Mercer County are usually held. It is a deep wide room entered from the rear, with a high ceiling punctured by two sets of square-paneled, frost-glass skylights.

‘The bench from which Justice Ira V. Menander, veteran jurist, will preside is high and wide, almost concealing the tall Judge’s chair. On the wall behind the bench are three doors, one at the extreme right leading to the jury room, one at the extreme left leading to the Bridge of Sighs, and one directly behind the Judge’s chair leading to His Honor’s chambers.

‘To the right of the bench is the witness box and beyond lies the jury box, composed of three rows of four chairs each. Before the bench,’ continued the AP man, warming to his work, ‘there is a narrow space for the court clerks and a large open area in which stand two round tables for the use of the defense and prosecution.

‘The spectators’ section, which consumes the remaining space in the courtroom, is divided in two by an aisle. Each side contains ten long wooden benches in five rows. Since each bench holds from six or seven persons, the capacity of the room is between 120 and 140 spectators.’

Miss Ella Amity, feature writer for the
Trenton Times
, scorned such dry details. Writing tearfully and copiously in the issue of Sunday, June the twenty-third, she plunged into the heart of matters.

‘Tomorrow morning at 10 o’clock Daylight Saving Time,’ she wrote, ‘a beautiful woman, glowing with youth and life, with a face and figure unspoiled by the dissipations of our hectic times, will be led from the County Jail on Cooper Street across the box-like Bridge of Sighs into a small, bare, grimy vestibule which opens into the courtroom where Mercer County tries its most hardened criminals.

‘She will be shackled to a deputy like a slave-girl of ancient times, to be placed on the block of Justice and sold to the higher bidder—the State of New Jersey in the person of Paul Pollinger, prosecutor of Mercer County, or her devoted and brilliant brother, William Angell of Philadelphia, who is directing her defense.

‘It will be for a jury of her peers to decide whether it was Lucy Wilson, young Philadelphia housewife, who thrust the keen point of a paper-cutter into her husband’s heart, or another woman. It is the opinion of many that Lucy Wilson must be judged by a jury who are truly her peers, or justice will not be done.

‘For it is not Lucy Wilson who is on trial for her life, it is Society. Society, which makes it possible for a man of wealth and position to marry a poor girl of the lower classes in another city under a false name, take ten of the most precious years of her life, and then—when it is too late—decide to tell the truth and confess his hideous sin to her. Society, which makes it possible for such a man to commit bigamy, to have a poor wife in Philadelphia and a rich one in New York, to spend his time calmly between the two wives and the two cities like a commuter. Innocent or guilty, Lucy Wilson is the real victim, not the man who lies buried in a Philadelphia cemetery under the name of Joseph Wilson, not the heiress of millions who took his real name of Gimball in vain at St Andrew’s Cathedral in New York in 1927. Will Society protect Lucy from itself? Will Society make amends for the ten years it took from her life? Will Society see that the crafty forces of wealth and social power do not crush her beneath their cruel heels? These are the questions which Trenton, Philadelphia, New York, the whole nation are asking themselves today.’