The Weird World of Wes Beattie

by John Norman Harris

“Did the deceased, Edgar Beattie, give any reason for this proposed change?” Sidney asked.

  “Yes sir,” Paget said. “He stated that he was displeased with the conduct of the accused.”

  “Did he state specifically the conduct that had displeased him?”

  Massingham half-rose, looked at the judge, then glowered at Sidney.

  “Yes sir. He said that the accused was a thief, and he wanted no part of him.”

  “Ah! And did he give any grounds for this statement that the accused was a thief?”

  “Yes sir. He said that Wes had been convicted of theft in court and could no longer expect decent people to have anything to do with him.”

  The jury gasped and glared at Wes, the spectators gasped, the judge glared at Sidney and Massingham was plainly nonplused.

  At that point, nothing could have been more damaging to the defense.

  Sidney blandly ignored the furor. “Oh,” he said. “Now, do you, of your own knowledge, know if this statement of the deceased’s was true? Had the accused been convicted of theft?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Were you present in court when he was convicted, and did you hear the evidence?”

  “I was, and I did.”

  “My Lord,” Massingham said, “I am sure the jury is interested in hearing about the previous criminal record of the accused, but all of this is wildly irrelevant.”

  “On the contrary, my Lord, in due course I will show that this is all relevant and vital.”

  “I hope you will,” the judge snapped. “Pray continue.”

  “You remember the witnesses in that case? Apart from police witnesses, there were two—a man and a woman.”

  “I recall them.”

  “And the name of the man, the male witness in that theft case?”

  “Sam Black.”

  “And the nature of his evidence?”

  “He said that he caught Wes Beattie with a woman’s handbag concealed under his coat, having just removed the handbag from a parked car.”

  “And is that the same Black who was recently murdered in a King Street parking lot?”

  Massingham jumped up and protested, but the damage was done.

  “And now, do you recall the woman witness?” Sidney asked.

  “I do. She gave her name as Mrs. Irene Leduc, of Sudbury.”

  “Now I show you a photograph and ask you if you can recognize the woman whom it portrays.”

  Paget looked carefully at the glossy print of Mrs. Wicklow and nodded. “That is the woman,” he said. “The woman who called herself Mrs. Leduc.”

  “My Lord, I wish to enter this photograph as an exhibit,” Sidney said.

  The photograph was duly marked and entered. “Now, Mr. Paget,” Sidney continued. “At that conversation, where Edgar told the accused that he intended to change his will, did the accused make any statement concerning his conviction for theft?”

  “Yes sir. He said that he had been innocent, but had been convicted as a result of a frame-up.”

  “Did he say anything specifically about the evidence given by the woman who called herself Mrs. Leduc?”

  “Yes sir. He said she was part of a conspiracy against him. He claimed she had given a false name in court.”

  “This woman had said that the accused stole her handbag?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did the deceased, Edgar Beattie, make any change in his plans after hearing this statement of the accused’s?”

  “Yes sir. He said he would trace the woman, Mrs. Leduc, and talk to her, before he altered his will.”

  “You were familiar with the character of Edgar Beattie?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “If he made a promise like that, would he be likely to keep it?”

  “If it were at all possible. He was a man of his word.”

  “And do you know if he succeeded in tracing this woman?”

  “No sir. I know that he tried…”

  “One moment. How can you know that?” Massingham interjected.

  “Sorry,” Paget said.

  “And did he, before he met his death, change his will?” Sidney asked.

  “No sir.”

  “He couldn’t very well change it after he met his death,” the judge said.

  “I am in your Lordship’s debt,” Sidney said, with a little bow. “Now, Mr. Paget, did Edgar Beattie later tell you, in the presence of the accused, that a man phoned him and advised him to stop searching for this woman?”

  “Not in the presence of the accused,” Paget said.

  Massingham was again on his feet. Question and answer had been sneaked in so neatly that it was scarcely worth protesting. Seeds, tiny seeds, had been sown.

  But, opposed to the weight of evidence which the prosecution was building, they were as nothing.

  The motive had been made clear, and the opportunity—for the police had produced the key to the apartment, which had been found in Wes Beattie’s key container. Then there were the fingerprints, and the damning statements made by Wes.

  Finally, on Thursday morning, Massingham called Major Barnaby Hale to the witness box. He looked the old-fashioned gentleman. There was a suggestion in his dress that he had just left a fashionable wedding. His mustache was an aggressive thing. His manner was authoritative.

  The Bible was handed to him.

  “Do you solemnly swear that the evidence which you shall give between our Sovereign Lady the Queen and the prisoner at the bar shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” the official intoned.

  “I do,” the major replied in a resonant voice.

  He then, under questioning, recounted how he had had occasion to talk with the accused in the presence of another, and how the accused had admitted to him that he was responsible for his uncle’s death, and repeated the words, “So you really killed him, didn’t you,” which he had used, and Wes’s reply, “I guess you could say so.”

  The major was a prominent figure. As a government official, he had frequently come out boldly in favor of the strap, the lash, the cat-o’-nine-tails and the noose. He was a believer in punishment, almost for its own sake. He was against the coddling of criminals, against the use of psychotherapy and sociological techniques. It had been said that he was born to play the Mikado, and when Sidney rose to cross-examine him, he looked rather like Ko-Ko before that stern ruler.

  “Now Mr. Hale,” Sidney began.

  “Major Hale, if you please,” the major corrected.

  “I’m so sorry, major. Where did this meeting take place?”

  “In the Psychiatric Hospital, where the accused was being held for observation.”

  “And what was the occasion of your visit?”

  “The Attorney General had asked for advice on the type of custody in which the accused should be kept. I was investigating the security of the hospital in relation to the prisoner.”

  “And when you entered his room, did you tell the hospital authorities you were going to?”

  “No. I didn’t want to bother them. I got a man on the cleaning staff or something to take me up.”

  “Did you bribe the man to take you up?”

  “I most certainly did not!” the major roared.

  “Well, did you tip him?”

  The major thought a moment. Sidney Grant had insisted that James Dunlay, the corroborating witness, be excluded until called.

  “Hum. Yes, I might have tipped him.”

  “I don’t want to know what you might have done,” Sidney said. “I want to know what you did.”

  “Yes, I tipped him.”

  “How much?”

  “Oh, I’m not sure. I can’t remember.”

  “Well, was it silver money or paper money?”

  “I don’t like the attitude you’re taking,” the major said. “You are insinuating…”

  “No. I’m asking. Silver or paper?”

  “Hum. Haw. Paper, I believe.”

  “A bill, eh? Now
, was it a dollar bill or larger?”

  “Oh, I can’t remember,” the major said.

  “So it could have been larger. Was it as large as a ten?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “You remember that much. Might it have been a five?”

  “Yes, it could have been a five. Possibly.”

  “Not a ten?”

  “I told you that. I remember now. It was a five.”

  “You’re quite sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “I’m happy to have restored your memory so thoroughly. Now, do you usually tip five dollars to people who show you upstairs?”

  “Well, it would depend on the circumstances.”

  “I’m sure it would. Major Hale, you have an area of responsibility for prison administration. Suppose a minor employee of a prison took a total stranger to see one of the prisoners without reporting the fact to his superiors. And suppose that the man accepted five dollars for taking him. Would you say that the man had been bribed?”

  “No. But that’s different…”

  “Is it? If such an incident were reported to you, would you not discipline the man?”

  “It would depend entirely on the circumstances.”

  “I’m sure it would,” Sidney said. “Now then, having tipped, but not bribed, this Dunlay with a five-dollar bill, you went to the room where the accused was under observation. Did you then state your name and your business?”

  “Well, no. I said ‘How do you do?’ and chatted about the weather.”

  “Did you at any time tell him your name and why you were there?”

  “I—no, I don’t believe so. I said—after certain preliminaries—‘You’re a very unhappy boy, aren’t you?’ He said yes, and I said he could tell me why, and that led up to his confession.”

  “Did you use the words ‘You can confide in me’?”

  “I don’t remember using such words.”

  “Are you prepared to swear that you didn’t use them?”

  “Oh, I may have said something like that, having no inkling, of course, that he was going to confess.”

  The major was becoming more and more uncomfortable.

  “Did you let him believe that you were a psychiatrist?” Sidney asked.

  “Well, I never said what I was. I can hardly tell what a person thinks.”

  “But you didn’t tell him you were acting as a high-level stool pigeon?”

  Sidney apologized to the court and to the major. He withdrew the question, and butter wouldn’t have melted in his mouth. But the purple explosion of the major had made it all worth while.

  Thereafter he forced the major to admit that he left the hospital without reporting the conversation to the authorities there, that he went back and betrayed the confession—the major objected to the word “betrayed,” and altered it to “reported”—to the Attorney General’s department, that he sent for Dunlay and discussed the overheard confession with him, that Dunlay impressed him as a superior sort of chap, which led the major to offer him a job. In general Sidney exposed the major’s action for what it was.

  Later he made a complete monkey of the unhappy Dunlay and demonstrated that he was a near-moron and incompetent to handle the job he had been given.

  But he failed utterly to shake the fact of the confession. No matter how equivocal it might have been, no matter how dishonorable the means of getting it, it was there, in the evidence, and the jury believed it. Belief was writ plain in their faces.

  And the prosecution case, built with great care, was coming to its close, after only four days. The last witness, Miss Florence Churcher, had been saved until the end because of her physical condition. She had not come to the court until Thursday afternoon, and she had to be helped into the witness box.

  Nevertheless she spoke up well and was a good witness. She got across. There was a sweet resignation in her manner and great courage. She described her actions on the night of the crime, and the finding of the body, in a high, clear voice, without undue emotion.

  But her most important contribution was in connection with the telephone. She absolutely identified the instrument on exhibit as the telephone which she had dusted for years in Edgar’s apartment. She pointed to paint splotches of various colors and told how they had got there during various paintings of the hall. She pointed to a telephone number scratched on the Bakelite and recalled that Edgar had scratched it there on an occasion when he had no pencil or paper.

  If Mr. Grant wanted to make anything of the telephone man’s failure to identify the telephone absolutely, Miss Churcher’s evidence would give him something to think about.

  It was the final thrust of the prosecution, and Massingham smiled broadly as he handed the witness over to his opponent.

  The jury was getting impatient. They had reached their verdict, and the rest was mere formality. In the morning Sidney would start building the defense, and it would be uphill all the way, and in the end he would face a terrible decision—whether or not to put Wes into the witness box.

  He stood by the lectern and looked at the thin, bent old lady with her face of pure goodness, and he wished devoutly that there were some way he could score one point on cross-examination. To bully her was unthinkable, and would have been disastrous.

  “Miss Churcher,” Sidney said, groping in darkness fathoms deep, “there was only one telephone in the apartment?”

  “Yes sir,” she said.

  “And you never at any time had an extension?”

  “No sir.”

  “So you never had occasion to send for an installer or a repairman from the telephone company?”

  “No sir.”

  Sidney paused. “So, to your knowledge, there was never a telephone repairman in the apartment during your stay?”

  “She’s already answered that question, Mr. Grant,” the judge said. “I trust there’s some point to these questions?”

  “Is that correct?” Sidney said.

  Excitement rose in Sidney, but he forced himself to be calm, for the witness appeared to be in doubt.

  “But my Lord, I didn’t answer that question,” Miss Churcher said. “You see, I said we never had occasion to send for a repairman. But I know a repairman came there once.”

  “But you didn’t send for him?”

  “No sir. Somebody else reported that our line was out of order, so the company sent a man. These people tried to phone us, and they couldn’t get through, so they reported the line out of order.”

  “And was the line out of order?” Sidney asked.

  “Yes, it was. But I didn’t know it until the repairman asked me to test it. Then I tried it, and it was dead. There wasn’t that buzzing you get…”

  “The dial tone?” Sidney suggested.

  “That’s right. No dial tone,” she said. “So the man said he’d have it right in a jiffy, and he did. There was no more trouble.”

  Massingham was getting impatient, and so was the judge.

  “Now can you tell us,” Sidney said, dreading the reply, “about when this call was made by the repairman?”

  She thought deeply.

  “WelI, it’s hard to say,” she said, “after all this time. But it wasn’t long before poor Edgar was killed. It was during that week, because I told him about it when he got home, and he thought it was very funny.”

  “Funny?” Sidney said. “What did he think was funny about it?”

  “Oh, not funny peculiar,” she said. “Funny ha ha. Edgar was a terrible tease. You see, the repairman told me our line was dead, and I said no it couldn’t be because I’d been talking on it not five minutes before.”

  “Miss Churcher,” the judge said gently, “you must not tell us what people said to you.”

  “But, my Lord, I promised to tell the whole truth,” she said. “And anyway, I had been talking just five minutes before, because this young lady called up from the Alfred Curry Studios and said, ‘Congratulations, you’ve just won two weeks’ free dancing lessons.’
That was the part that Edgar thought was funny, because I told her dancing lessons were no good to me because I’m well over eighty and have arthritis, but not because I disapprove. We were Methodists, but we danced and played cards, and I’ve even done the Charleston…”

  The jury and spectators were enjoying it, and the judge, in spite of his exasperation, was amused.

  “Miss Churcher, you must just answer the questions. You must not volunteer anything.”

  Sidney’s heart was pounding violently in his rib cage. “Now how did your conversation with the Alfred Curry Studio end?” he asked.

  “Well, this young lady was so persistent, saying that all kinds of people dance today, that finally I just hung up and went about my work.”

  “Now then. The repairman. Did you get a good look at him? Would you recognize him again?”

  “Oh, I think so,” she said. “I don’t see many people, and I remember faces very well. My eyesight and hearing are quite good, but I have to wear glasses.”

  “Now did this man ring the front doorbell, and did he tell you through the speaking tube that he was a telephone man?” Sidney asked.

  “No, I don’t think so,” she said. “I think he just knocked at the door. He must have come in as someone was going out.”

  “Thank you. That is all,” Sidney said.

  “No further questions,” Massingham said.

  And as court adjourned, Sidney watched Massingham make a dive for Mr. Rimmer, the telephone company witness, to find out what in blazes was wrong with the company records.

  Sidney himself made a dive for June and booked her for drinks and dinner.

  Fourteen

  “I’VE BEEN AN INCREDIBLE IDIOT,” Sidney said, after the drinks arrived. “I should have known better. I really solved this case at the seminar, when I heard Dr. Heber talking about it. All the answers came to me then, I mean the principle of the thing. I’m like Shaw’s Saint Joan—I should have believed my voices. I started looking for what was credible, instead of recognizing the truth. And your brother Wes is so damn impressionable, so easily dominated.”

  “Stop being Delphic,” she said. “What are you yattering about?”

  “Your brother,” he said. “The principle of the thing is this: Wes is an experienced and competent liar. Given half a chance, he can construct a credible lie. Nobody believes him, of course, which is the penalty liars pay. Once they are known, their best efforts are rejected. The whole point of Wes’s conspiracy story is that it was incredible. As a lie, it was much below the Wesleyan standard.