§ 29
The time came when the prosecution closed its case, and Peter was
summoned to the office of Andrews, to be coached in his part as a
witness. He would be wanted in two or three days, the lawyers told
him.
Now Peter had never intended to appear as a witness; he had been
fooling the defense all this time — "stringing them along," as he phrased
it, so as to keep in favor with them to the end. Meantime he had been
figuring out how to justify his final refusal. Peter was eating his
lunch when this plan occurred to him, and he was so much excited that he
swallowed a piece of pie the wrong way, and had to jump up and run out
of the lunch-room. It was his
first stroke of genius; hitherto it was McGivney who had
thought these things out, but now Peter was on the way
to becoming his own boss! Why should he go on taking
orders, when he had such brains of his own? He took the
plan to McGivney, and McGivney called it a "peach," and
Peter was so proud he asked for a raise, and got it.
This plan had the double advantage that not merely would it save
Peter's prestige and reputation, among the Reds, it would ruin
McCormick, who was one of the hardest workers for the defense, and one
of the most dangerous Reds in American City, as well as being a personal
enemy of Peter's. McGivney pulled some of his secret wires, and the
American City "Times," in the course of its accounts of the case,
mentioned a rumor that the defense proposed to put on the stand a man
who claimed to have been tortured in the city jail, in an effort to make
him give false testimony against Goober; the prosecution had
investigated this man's record and discovered that only recently he had
seduced a young girl, and she had killed herself because of his refusal
to marry her. Peter took this copy of the American City "Times" to the
office of David Andrews, and insisted upon seeing the lawyer before he
went to court; he laid the item on the desk, and declared that there was
his finish as a witness in the Goober case. "It's a cowardly, dirty
lie!" he declared. "And the man responsible for circulating it is Pat
McCormick."
Such are the burdens that fall upon the shoulders of
lawyers in hard-fought criminal trials! Poor Andrews did
his best to patch things up; he pleaded with Peter — if the
story was false, Peter ought to be glad of a chance to
answer his slanderers. The defense would put witnesses
on the stand to deny it. They would produce Sadie Todd
to deny it.
"But Sadie told me she suspected me!"
"Yes," said Andrews, "but she told me recently she
wasn't sure."
"Much good that'll do me!" retorted Peter. "They'll
ask me if anybody ever accused me, and who, and I'll have
to say McCormick, and if they put him on the stand, will he
deny that he accused me?"
Peter flew into a rage against McCormick; a fine sort of radical
he was, pretending to be devoted to the cause, and having no better
sense than to repeat a cruel slander against a comrade! Here Peter had
been working on this case for nearly six months, working for barely
enough to keep body and soul together, and now they expected him to go
on the and have a story like that brought out in the papers, and have
the prosecution hiring witnesses to prove him a villain. "No, sir!" said
Peter. "I'm thru with this case right now. You put McCormick on the
witness stand and let him save Goober's life. You can't use me, I'm
out!" And shutting his ears to the lawyer's pleading, he stormed out of
the office, and over to the office of the Goober Defense Committee,
where he repeated the same scene.
