“Yes, I know.
I’ve thought of all that.”
“Well, then —”
“Well, I’ll tell you, Jephson, it’s a tough case and no mistake.
It looks to me now as though Mason has all the cards.
If we can get this chap off, we can get anybody off.
But as I see it, I’m not so sure that we want to mention that cataleptic business yet — at least not unless we want to enter a plea of insanity or emotional insanity, or something like that — about like that Harry Thaw case, for instance.”
He paused and scratched his slightly graying temple dubiously.
“You think he’s guilty, of course?” interpolated Jephson, dryly.
“Well, now, as astonishing as it may seem to you, no.
At least, I’m not positive that I do.
To tell you the truth, this is one of the most puzzling cases I have ever run up against.
This fellow is by no means as hard as you think, or as cold — quite a simple, affectionate chap, in a way, as you’ll see for yourself — his manner, I mean.
He’s only twenty-one or two.
And for all his connections with these Griffiths, he’s very poor — just a clerk, really.
And he tells me that his parents are poor, too.
They run a mission of some kind out west — Denver, I believe — and before that in Kansas City.
He hasn’t been home in four years.
In fact, he got into some crazy boy scrape out there in Kansas City when he was working for one of the hotels as a bell-boy, and had to run away.
That’s something we’ve got to look out for in connection with Mason — whether he knows about that or not.
It seems he and a bunch of other bell-hops took some rich fellow’s car without his knowing it, and then because they were afraid of being late, they ran over and killed a little girl.
We’ve got to find out about that and prepare for it, for if Mason does know about it, he’ll spring it at the trial, and just when he thinks we’re least expecting it.”
“Well, he won’t pull that one,” replied Jephson, his hard, electric, blue eyes gleaming, “not if I have to go to Kansas City to find out.”
And Belknap went on to tell Jephson all that he knew about Clyde’s life up to the present time — how he had worked at dish-washing, waiting on table, soda-clerking, driving a wagon, anything and everything, before he had arrived in Lycurgus — how he had always been fascinated by girls — how he had first met Roberta and later Sondra.
Finally how he found himself trapped by one and desperately in love with the other, whom he could not have unless he got rid of the first one.
“And notwithstanding all that, you feel a doubt as to whether he did kill her?” asked Jephson, at the conclusion of all this.
“Yes, as I say, I’m not at all sure that he did.
But I do know that he is still hipped over this second girl.
His manner changed whenever he or I happened to mention her.
Once, for instance, I asked him about his relations with her — and in spite of the fact that he’s accused of seducing and killing this other girl, he looked at me as though I had said something I shouldn’t have — insulted him or her.”
And here Belknap smiled a wry smile, while Jephson, his long, bony legs propped against the walnut desk before him, merely stared at him.
“You don’t say,” he finally observed.
“And not only that,” went on Belknap, “but he said,
‘Why, no, of course not.
She wouldn’t allow anything like that, and besides,’ and then he stopped.
‘And besides what, Clyde,’ I asked.
‘Well, you don’t want to forget who she is.’
‘Oh, I see,’ I said.
And then, will you believe it, he wanted to know if there wasn’t some way by which her name and those letters she wrote him couldn’t be kept out of the papers and this case — her family prevented from knowing so that she and they wouldn’t be hurt too much.”
“Not really?
But what about the other girl?”
“That’s just the point I’m trying to make.
He could plot to kill one girl and maybe even did kill her, for all I know, after seducing her, but because he was being so sculled around by his grand ideas of this other girl, he didn’t quite know what he was doing, really.
Don’t you see?
You know how it is with some of these young fellows of his age, and especially when they’ve never had anything much to do with girls or money, and want to be something grand.”
“You think that made him a little crazy, maybe?” put in Jephson.
“Well, it’s possible — confused, hypnotized, loony — you know — a brain storm as they say down in New York.
But he certainly is still cracked over that other girl.
In fact, I think most of his crying in jail is over her.
He was crying, you know, when I went in to see him, sobbing as if his heart would break.”