The Fourth Side of the Triangle

“No, sor,” said Cleary stoutly. “On account of him and me was talking about the fight. I says, ‘Time for the big fight any minute now,’ and he says, ‘Big fight?” like he never heard of the fights. Who’s fighting?’ he says — a championship fight! So I tell him the champ is battling this Puerto Rican challenger, Kid Aguirre, and he looks at me like I’m talking Siwash.”

“And that made you remember it was this man, on that particular night?”

“Wouldn’t it make anybody? Anyways, I turn on the TV and we watch the fight. After the first round I says to him—”

“To the gentleman with the gray beard?”

“Sure, who else we talking about? I says to him, ‘What d’ye think?” And he says, ‘That boy — the Kid — he’ll never make it. He ain’t got what it takes. The champ will knock him out,” he says to me.”

“One moment, Mr. Cleary. Mr. McKell, will you please rise — it isn’t necessary to come forward — and face this witness? Now will you please say in a conversational tone, ‘That boy will never make it. The champ will knock him out.’”

“That boy will never make it,” said Ashton McKell. “The champ will knock him out.”

“Mr. Cleary, to the best of your recollection, is that the voice, the same voice, of the gray-bearded man you talked to in your bar on the night of September 14th?”

“Sure and it’s the same, ain’t that what I’m telling you, sor?”

“You’re sure it’s the same voice.”

“I can hear it ringing in me ears,” said Cleary poetically, “right now.”

O’Brien quickened the pace of his questions. They watched the fight, Cleary said, and in round two they made a ten-dollar bet on the outcome, Cleary maintaining that Kid Aguirre would last the full fifteen rounds, the gray-bearded man insisting that the Kid would be knocked out. And knocked out he was, “as ye’ll remember, sor, in the third, to me sorrow.”

“Did you pay the man the ten dollars?”

“He wouldn’t let me. ‘Put it in the jar for the orphans,’ he says, which I done.”

“One last question, Mr. Cleary: You and this gray-haired man were watching the original telecast of the fight, not a rerun on tape?”

Cleary was sure. The fight had been fought in Denver over closed-circuit television, but it was telecast live for the East, and the tapes were not shown anywhere until the following day.

The district attorney made a savage attempt to break down Cleary’s identification of “Dr. Stone.” But luck had thrown a stubborn Irishman his way. The harder De Angelus hammered, the more positive Cleary became. When the cross-examination became abusive, O’Brien politely stepped in: “It seems to me, Your Honor, the witness has answered each of the district attorney’s questions not once but half a dozen times. I think we are approaching the point of badgering, and I respectfully call your attention to it.”

The judge glared at O’Brien, but he stopped De Angelus.

Nothing was left for O’Brien but to thrust the point between the horns. He introduced into evidence the official time of the Kid Aguirre knockout, as certified by the timekeeper of the championship fight and the records of the Colorado boxing commission.

Time of knockout: 10:27:46 — forty-six seconds after twenty-seven minutes after ten o’clock P.M. Eastern Time.

Robert O’Brien summed up for the defense: “I am sure it isn’t necessary, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to remind you that none of us is here in this courtroom to punish moral turpitude. The question you are asked to decide is not one of sin but of guilt. There is only one question on which His Honor will charge you to consider your verdict, and that is: Was the defendant, Ashton McKell, guilty of murdering Sheila Grey by gunshot at twenty-three minutes past ten o’clock on the night of September 14th? You have heard testimony here that must convince anyone that Mr. McKell could not physically have been guilty of that crime. He could not have committed it because, at the time it was committed, he was seated at a bar half a city mile from the scene of the crime, and continued to sit there for some time afterward.

“Not only could Ashton McKell not have shot Sheila Grey, he could not have been at or even near the scene of her death when the fatal shot was fired.

“I repeat: No other aspect of the case should concern you, or — under what I am confident will be Judge Suarez’s charge-legally can concern you. Consequently, no reasonable man or woman could bring in a verdict of anything but not guilty.”