CHAPTER VII
Habit, with the alarm of regularity, aroused Joan Daisy in time for work on Monday morning. Habitually she was out of bed in a moment, alert and lively, however late she might have been the night before; but this morning she felt tired and heavy; and as she sat up to orient herself in relation to the persons important to her, she remembered that Ket's room was empty and that he was locked in a police cell indefinitely located downtown.
Hoberg, she recollected, had come to her door with Dads last night but since she was in bed, Dads had refused to let him in.
Now there was another man, suddenly become of overwhelming importance to her, whom she must place in relation to herself, whenever she took her reckonings; he was Mr. Clarke of the state's attorney's office, who was bound to kill Ket, if he could, and demolish in her the dream for which and by which she lived.
Sunlight streamed through her east window and the might of the sun, the spread of the city below it, the morning murmur of millions beginning again to go about their tasks, excited Joan Daisy and reinspired her to fight. She would fight Mr. Clarke for Ket and save him! Saving Ket, she could go on about her business of making him great, she could work, work, work with him and through him for her worth in the world, which a girl needed for a goal on a morning like this with sunlight over the city.
So Joan Daisy arose, tired no longer. Quietly, out of regard for the slumber of her mother and Dads, she went to the kitchenette and started coffee for herself and put on an egg to boil. After her shower bath, she extinguished the burners under pot and pan and, after having dressed, she breakfasted, washed the dishes which she had used and reconverted her bed into a couch.
It was likely, she considered, that Dads had plenty of money, which had been got no more dishonestly than by "borrowing" from Hoberg; and, if he had cash, he would be generous with mamma. However, he might have had money last night and have none now; so Joan Daisy took her usual precaution of hiding a couple of quarter dollars in the cinnamon jar, where her mother would look for money, if in need.
None of these domestic doings, and least of all her hope and dream, could have been so much as suspected by the man whom Calvin had posted to watch the flat. He merely saw her emerge from the building at quarter before eight when, after hesitating at the door until the walk momentarily was clear, she hurried away and mingled in the crowd for the elevated.
"She looked cool and O. K.," reported the detective who had been detailed to observe her. "I'll say she rested all right; she went straight to the office of G. A. Hoberg and is there with him now."
Calvin received this information in his office where, on this Monday morning, he was busy assembling and assorting the reports, records and exhibits of evidence, memoranda, photographs, plates and affidavits which he would offer to prove, beyond any matter of reasonable doubt, that Frederic Ketlar had killed Adele, his wife, and which proved, to Calvin's mind, that Joan Daisy Royle had been implicated with him.
The gathered evidence, as he sorted it before him, was damning—thrillingly, depressingly damning. If it was not yet complete, still it was sufficient for the purposes of the day; it would start the moving of the machinery of punishment reposited in this building and in the building beside it.
For this, in which was Calvin's office, was the Criminal Courts Building of Cook County—a grim, grimy and very gray structure of rough-hewn stone rising to a height of no more than six old-fashioned floors and situated in a drab, dingy district of fourth-rate importance only but for the presence of the Courts building and its companion.
The Criminal Courts Building warrants, fully, its name; from ground to roof, it is given solely to encounter with crime. The sheriff's quarters claim the first floor; the state's attorney, the second, and above, floor by floor, to right and to left, are the courts—the courts exclusively devoted to the hearing of serious crimes. Felonies, or offenses punishable only by imprisonment or death, crowd the calendars of those courts; felons are brought, with tall bailiffs beside them—burglars and burners of homes, footpads, bandits, gunmen, poisoners, kidnapers, patricides, matricides, slayers of a brother, of a rival, of a paramour, the girl who has shot her husband, the man who murdered his wife.
Complete, under the roof and within the walls of the Criminal Courts building, moves the machinery of the law dealing with such offenders. The building beside it, all stone and of blacker gray and showing to the streets tall, narrow windows closely barred, is the jail.
It is joined to the Criminal Courts by an inseparable, Siamese-twin-like nexus dubbed "The Bridge of Sighs." In the jail is the Death Chamber; in the jail lie the beams of the gibbet awaiting the carpenter's hammer to erect in the jail yard the instrument of extreme punishment decreed in the courts at the other end of the Bridge of Sighs.
So the business of the Criminal Courts building is awful and forbidding to persons of weak thought and easy emotionalism, but to Calvin Clarke it was the business of enforcing the fundamental, and yet failing, discipline of the State. Ofter he felt, when he was at work within this grim, gray, ill-furnished building, that he was in the very citadel of American civilization; here he protected the palladium of order and law brought to America long ago by his fathers and which the people of to-day would, if they could, throw down and destroy.
It being Monday morning, the calendars of all the courts were crowded, and ceaseless lines of felons, manacled to police, the attorneys who would defend them, witnesses for them—their fathers, mothers, friends—pushed through the doorways hoping to cheat the law. Citizens, called for jury service, weighted the elevators for the courts—American citizens all, though to-day, undoubtedly, they would free, on the flimsiest of excuses or the most maudlin of emotions, robbers, extortioners, murderers.
Yes, murderers especially they were wont to free and most particularly when there was a pretty girl to ogle them from the witness stand.
Calvin, pushing back from the papers which he had prepared, imagined the appearance of Joan Daisy Royle before a jury of these weaklings, hearing the case of Ketlar; and while he was thus imagining, young Heminway, from the next office, looked in.
Heminway was one of the assistant state's attorneys who had been born in Chicago, raised and educated there and consequently, to Calvin's mind, he accepted as natural and inevitable an appalling prevalence of crime.
On the other hand, Calvin's feeling of personal possessiveness for the country, which Arthur Todd had observed, had not escaped the young men born in Chicago who coöperated with Calvin in assisting the state's attorney.
Heminway, having glanced in, turned to meet Ellison, who shared Calvin's office.
"Boston about?" inquired Ellison, expectantly. He was a cheery Chicagoan, just thirty-two, stout, fair and florid as any Nordic, but with a bald spot and the need of eyeglasses.
"About?" replied Heminway. Boston, of course, was Calvin Clarke in the office vernacular. "He's all over the place and unusually low in his mind over us this mornang. He's got the Ketlar case."
"So I was just able to gather from the public prints on the train," said Ellison, who had week-ended in Geneva. "So it hit the Pilgrim son particularly hard, did it?"
Then, catching a glimpse of Boston, Ellison halted before he entered his and the Pilgrim son's office.
It had been remarked by him before, with what astonishing verity the features of a Puritan colonist had been inherited by Calvin Clarke. "Give him a Pilgrim hat and jerkin and knickerbockers and he might be William Bradford stepping on the Rock—or his own first ancestor," Ellison previously had said. And now again, looking at the man before the window, the likeness caught the Chicagoan; and it was not merely the physical reincarnation of spare, strong, hardy body and straight-featured face; it was the reincarnation of the character of the men and women of this man's blood on both sides for generations that held Ellison at the door and stabbed him with a sudden pang of envy.
Calvin looked about and, as suddenly as he had felt envy, the Chicagoan felt himself on the defensive for his city against "Boston," and he expressed it in the one way which Boston never understood.
"Well," he commented, as if proudly, and tossing away his hat casually, "they certainly notched up the old gunstock on the Sabbath. We've eight for last week now, if we stick to the Bible."
"What about the Bible?" Calvin asked, aware that Ellison meant the total of murders in the city, but not understanding the rest.
"If we count Sunday the seventh day, eight last week; otherwise we've only five for last week but a great old start of three for this. I see you got yourself into the papers with the little lady in the Ketlar case," Ellison continued, without giving Boston a chance to catch breath. "Is she as good looking as she seems from the picture?"
"No," said Calvin, and then, realizing that he had denied the truth, he corrected, "Yes; I suppose she is."
"Anything more against her than the papers tell?" Ellison asked.
"Much more," replied Calvin. "But last night we had to release her."
"What's her real rôle to be, do you figure?"
"What?"
"How's the defense going to cast her, I mean?"
"She makes his alibi; but I'll break it up. I have broken it already."
"That radio alibi, 'Home, Sweet Home' in Los Angeles, you mean?"
"Exactly."
"Who thought that up, d'you suppose, Boston? He or she?"
"She I haven't a doubt."
"Clever girl, if she did; and not so easy to break, I'd say. Catches the imagination, you see; something new. Not much like swearing on the old stand, 'He was with me exactly at ten minutes to one o'clock,' to say, 'I swear he was with me, whatever the time was, when a woman was singing "Home, Sweet Home" In Los Angeles.' You'll have your work cut out to break that up."
"I've broken it already," Calvin repeated, stubbornly.
"But you're not going to enter a charge against herself."
"No, I'm afraid not."
"That's too bad."
"It certainly is."
"Of course," said Ellison, considering. "She'll make a good thing out of it, as the case stands; as chief witness for Ketlar, and especially if you claim loud enough that he killed for her, she'll be worth show money on any vaudeville circuit; but nothing like what she'd get if you tried the girl herself. Of course, the jury would acquit her with the usual cheers. It looks to me as if she made a big mistake claiming that she stayed outside on the beach."
"I will break the alibi and convict Ketlar," Calvin iterated, not permitting his mind to wander.
"Far be it from me to discourage you, whatever the fate of previous efforts have been. I only don't want you to labor under the delusion that your verdict is going to be much influenced by this." Ellison swept his hand over the reports and exhibits on Calvin's desk. "When you've a girl like this young lady against you, a situation arises for which Harvard Law School is simply no preparation at all.
"You're going to have a jury of men, you know; the defense will see to that, and they'll challenge anybody that's over thirty—unless he's over sixty, too. You're going to have a nice impressionable panel of boys to pass on the question of guilt and punishment, Calvin, and they're going to be mighty interested in Joan Daisy Royle. The defense won't bother much about proof and evidence. Why should it, when it has her? David Belasco or Flo Ziegfeld have all the legal training necessary for a defense lawyer before a jury in these days when a girl is involved. The game is simply to play the girl so as to get the Jury crazy about her; then they'll do any little favor, like freeing a murderer, just to see her smile."
"They won't free this one," declared Calvin.
"Then," said Ellison, yawning, "history will have to cease to repeat itself in criminal trials in this United States of America of yours and, I may say, mine."
Louder shuffling and commotion in the halls denoted that an unusually important prisoner was being escorted to the courts. Detonations of flashlight powder thudded, and the swinging doors of the state's attorney's suite wafted in the fumes.
"Ketlar's here, Mr. Clarke!" a bailiff announced and Calvin gathered up his papers. With Ellison following, he climbed the iron stairs back of the elevator, and when he was half way to the floor above, perfumes and heavy scents of cosmetics reached him; he came to a wall of women, backs to him, elbowing toward the doors of a court.
Calvin halted until a guard saw him and cleared a path for him between the perfumed, perspiring girls who turned rouged faces and appealed to him with their painted lips.
He passed them silently and meant not even to look them over, but he did so. The Royle girl was not in the hall; and when he entered the courtroom, he failed to see her.
The judge was in his place and thirty or forty people were pressed close to the bar before him. Ketlar was there; for Calvin saw his light hair with the dark heads of guards beside him. G. A. Hoberg's red head was there with a broad, bald, black-fringed head next. Gold spectacle bows looped over the ears, and Calvin knew Hoberg's neighbor for Max Elmen, the criminal lawyer.
On the other side of him was a short, fat man with thick lips and bristling black hair; this was Weigal, Calvin realized, the proprietor of the Echo Garden. There were newspaper men, and gesturing foreigners whispering together whom Calvin took for musicians from the Echo; girls had pushed to places in this group before the judge. The Nesson girl, Calvin recognized; and there was the woman who had asked him for Ketlar's child last night.
She looked older, in daylight, with her bleached, blond, carefully waved hair and her powdered skin, but she stood with no less dignity than she had in the dark; she stood very erect at a distance of six feet back of her son; several men were between her and him, and as she gazed at his tall, flaxen head, she moved her own head slightly from right to left to keep her son in sight as people between blocked her vision.
The red head of Hoberg bent down, and as the man spoke to some one hidden by him, Calvin started, and he knew that the Royle girl was there.
"Your honor," declaimed Elmen's deep, rasping voice, "your honor," he addressed the judge again and then turned and in taunting tone challenged Calvin, "if the State is now represented, if you please," he added with exaggerated indulgence.
"The state is represented," replied Calvin, pushing forward, and his own word put him in mind again of the Royle girl's challenge of him for coming in the name of the State. He confronted his immediate antagonist, who was Elmen; but his mind for the moment lingered in that space, hidden by Hoberg, where undoubtedly the Royle girl stood. He imagined her standing on tiptoes to see him.
Elmen awaited him, looking him over lazily. It was a trick of Elmen's, which Calvin well knew, and yet which always irritated him. Elmen had large, greenish, heavy-lidded eyes capable of a peculiarly contemptuous squint of sleepy unconcern which, on occasion, he embroidered with a frog-like yawn. Now he decided to compliment Calvin with his yawn, which he illy concealed with the long, tapering fingers of his right hand. He tapped his parted lips and asked, "You are quite ready?" as though he wished to be sure before he took the trouble to wake up.
"Quite," returned Calvin, coldly, and Elmen opened wide his eyes and spun about alertly.
"Your honor, we are come before this court because we are obliged to appeal to your honor to obtain for this man the right set in the charter of free society and assured to every man six hundred years ago. Your honor," declaimed Elmen, "since the people of England wrested the magna charta from the tyrant John, in the swamp of Runnymede, the statute of every free state has declared that no man may be imprisoned by another, be he prince, tyrant or state's attorney, save by due process of law. The question, as your honor knows, is not debatable," Elmen continued, turning to Calvin as offensively as possible and, picking up a paper, he read in his loud, raspIng voice the formal petition for the person of Frederic Ketlar.
Weigal, of the Echo Garden, appeared as the petitioner, citing the charter won by the English long ago on that field of Runnymede. For a moment, Calvin's mind jumped from the immediate proceedings. His forefathers, or at least men of his blood, were the fighters on that field. Where were Elmen's and Weigal's, then? Usurers in some Polish or Austrian city, they had been, he thought.
Elmen finished his fine effect and Calvin, looking up at the judge, related very quietly:
"Your honor, one Adele Ketlar, the wife of this man whose release is asked, was murdered early on Sunday morning. This Frederic Ketlar, though he had been living separately from his wife, visited her about quarter to one, and evidence is available that he shot and killed her, immediately returning to his separate apartment, where he was taken by the police, to whom he gave a totally unsatisfactory account of himself.
"Evidence in the possession of the State is already so complete that I will present it to-day before the grand jury. I will have an indictment by night."
"Hearing on this petition," said the judge, "is continued until the day after to-morrow. What date is that, clerk? . . . So enter it. The prisoner is committed to the custody of the sheriff and shall be lodged in jail, where he shall have all proper opportunity to consult with attorney, his family and friends."
The judge signed a paper and turned away. Elmen suddenly appeared to have gone to sleep on his feet; he groped, with contemptuous carelessness, for his portfolio, his eyes half closed again. He had made merely a grand gesture and had expected no more from it.
A hand—a white, small, lovely and very intent hand grasped Elmen's loose sleeve. "That's all, Mr. Elmen? That's all?" the Royle girl's thrilling voice besought and momentarily made him open his eyes again.
"That's all, of course," Elmen said. "That's all—just now."
"But the judge said he was going to jail!"
Elmen nodded, his eyes half closed.
"But he's not been tried!"
"Of course not. If he had been tried," said Elmen, elaborately yawning, "he would not be going to jail." Elmen cast his last words at Calvin and shook off the girl's grasp.
"What has happened? What does it mean?" she cried to Calvin and, gazing into her blue eyes, he discerned that, in her ignorance, she had expected some extravagantly impossible result from this proceeding.
"It means that this attempt to free the prisoner has failed," Calvin told her. "It means that he is going to jail."
"I heard that; but why?"
"Because the State has accused him."
"You have accused him, you mean!"
"Come out," warned Calvin, "if you want to say such things. You can not say them in court."
"But can't you explain to me?" she pleaded, her hand grasping the edge of his coat.
"When the State accuses a prisoner, he can be legally held awaiting action of the grand jury. The grand jury is a body of citizens, in session on the top floor of this building, before whom the State relates its evidence and who decide whether the State can continue to hold the prisoner or not. I will go before the grand jury this afternoon with my witnesses."
Her hand left Calvin's coat and she tugged at Elmen. "Why didn't you tell me that? You said, if we failed this morning, the trial would not be for two or three months; but he says he's going before the grand jury, in this building, this afternoon!"
"Why should I bother you with that?" said Elmen, without opening his eyes. "You have nothing to do with the grand jury."
"I'll go before it and tell it the truth!" she cried, at which Elmen merely shook his head.
"You can't," said Calvin. "The grand jury hears no one for the defense; it hears only the evidence of the State."
"Your evidence, you mean, and not mine?"
"Come out," said Calvin again; and Hoberg loomed behind her; Hoberg's big red hand closed over the small, white one which reached toward Calvin in her appeal.
Calvin moved toward the doors and the whole group moved as Ketlar was led along by his guards. Calvin hardly had looked at the prisoner's face, but, in the hall, he turned and witnessed the proceeding which, in accordance with the order of the court, transferred the prisoner from the care of the police to the custody of guards from the jail.
A tall deputy, with a manacle locked about his wrist, raised his arm and offered the open half of the manacle to the prisoner and Ket stood and stared at it and swung his eyes away and sought Calvin's eyes; and Calvin steadily met the weak, frightened appeal. Ketlar wiped his brow with his hand and started to lower his arm and then impulsively thrust it into the manacle. The lock clicked and the prisoner and his guard dropped arms, handcuffed together.
"Oh!" cried out the Royle girl and Calvin started.
Beside the elevator, which waited to bring the prisoner and his guards to the street, stood the erect figure of the bleached-haired woman watching her son, her eyes never leaving him, her lips tight-pressed, without outcry or quiver.
Calvin stepped to the stairs and descended to his office; but there he opened his window and leaned out to see the procession passing below on the way to the jail.
Ketlar, manacled to the guard, formed the nucleus of a swirl of people which seemed sucked, as by some external power, toward the corner of the Criminal Courts Building and about it toward the jail. In the swirl Calvin saw the big bulk of Hoberg and beside him the small figure of Joan Royle; behind, at the same distance she had maintained in the court, followed Ketlar's mother, steadily keeping step with the pace of her son.
A girl, who had posted herself near the edge of the walk, attracted Calvin's attention. He saw her light a cigarette, puff at it, and he saw her suddenly dash into the crowd and take the cigarette from her lips and thrust it between Ketlar's.
Calvin saw Ketlar halt and speak to her; undoubtedly, he thanked her, and, close together, they turned the corner and disappeared.
She was the Nesson girl, Calvin realized.
Introduction to the jail, being a formal affair, was by the ceremonial door direct from the street rather than over the Bridge of Sighs, which customarily is employed for the passage of prisoners from cell to court and to cell again during the ordeal days of a trial.
The jail, although offering its entrants no choice whatsoever except to be entertained therein, requires a most detailed history of every person received, almost as if it were extremely particular regarding those whom it admitted.
Calvin Clarke, having occasion to send for a copy of the prisoner's record card, glanced down the columns describing the height, weight, color, hair, eyes, age, condition of heart, lungs and general physical, occupational, educational and religious status of Ketlar, Frederic (no alias), and he observed that Ketlar claimed not only American citizenship by birth but by descent. Yet in the space which recorded information regarding his parents, appeared replies in respect to his mother, only.
"Mother: Anna Ketlar Folwell," read the card and her address followed. After the query, "Father," the card was blank, except for a check of pen to indicate that this question had not been omitted, but had been asked of the prisoner, and that for it he had no reply.
That check of the pen surprised Calvin with a pang of pity which he immediately banished by summoning recollection of Adele Ketlar's pale, painted face; yet after he had put the card aside he pulled it before him again and gazed at that pen scratch which set him to counting, in contrast, the known, long line of his fathers.
Calvin appeared before the grand jury on that same afternoon and, before night, he had obtained, as he had promised the judge, a formal indictment from the twenty-three men of the jury who heard the State's evidence, but who were required neither to see Ketlar nor to hear any of his witnesses.
However, they saw one witness for Ketlar, but this was only after they had voted the indictment and had adjourned for the day, when, on their way from the grand jury room, they came upon a slight girl in a blue suit who gazed at them, one by one, with steady and very disconcerting eyes, but who spoke never a word.
"See here," Calvin challenged her, when he came out. "What are you doing here?"
"I've been out here," Joan Daisy defied him, "nearly all the afternoon. I tried to get in when you were talking in there, but that man," she jerked her head toward a guard, "wouldn't let me."
"The indictment is voted," Calvin said, in his slow, satisfied way.
"So I've heard! So we'll have no day after to-morrow in court. Ket's in jail and stays there till you try him—you try him," she repeated, her head lifting and her voice thrilling again, "for his life!"
"Yes," said Calvin, coloring, and swung away. But her small, strong hand caught his wrist and closed tight.
"What is it?" he demanded, turning to her with his heart athump from the binding clasp of her fingers.
"It's—it's," she said and held faster as he tried to free his wrist. "It's that I'm going to beat you; I'm going to beat you to a pulp!"
She flung down his arm, which he let hang beside him, as he watched her walk away.
When she had disappeared, he examined his wrist which exhibited a row of white marks made by the pressure of her finger-tips and one small, crescent nail-mark which bled. He scarcely could feel it, physically, but it aroused in him surprising sensation. It was blood drawn by her with intent to hurt him. He was sure that she had meant to hurt him and it excited an amazing conflict of pleasure and offense.
He dabbed away the drops of blood and, after he had done this once more, the bleeding ceased and the little cut required no more attention; yet, after he had returned to his office and was at his desk and when he was sure that Ellison was not watching, he furtively thrust back his cuff and regarded the little red nail-mark with a queer, puzzling excitement.
Ellison, who during the day had been assigned to the case, looked up from his examination of the evidence which had been brought down from the grand jury room.
"We've a good hanging case, I'd say," he asserted, "but for that Royle girl."
"We'll beat that Royle girl!" Calvin promised.