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Guilty As Charged
by
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.