Redemption by Howard Fast

Author:Howard Fast
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

EIGHT

THE PEOPLE’S CASE

THE PEOPLE BEGAN its case by calling Alec Prosky as its first witness. “Rudge is methodical,” Sarah whispered to me. “He will pile on facts and more facts even when he has no facts, counting on the accumulation of detail to impress the jury.”

Prosky stated his name and took the oath.

“What is your work?” Rudge asked. “Would you describe it, Mr. Prosky?”

“I work for Kelvin Kleaners. We clean office buildings after the people who work there have left.”

“We, I take it, means you are part of a crew.”

“Yes, sir.” Prosky, a burly man in his thirties, was a mixture of awe and pride. Here he was, in the great Greco-Roman-style building that housed the New York Supreme Court, as the first witness in a sensational murder case that had been headline news for weeks.

“How many men are in the crew?”

“It depends on the building. For the Omnibus, we use six. Frank Goober is the job boss.” Prosky was gaining assurance as he spoke.

“What time do you begin at the Omnibus Building?”

“Midnight.”

“And where were you at twelve-thirty A.M. on May twenty-fifth, 1996?”

“I was working the seventeenth floor, the offices of Garson, Weeds and Anderson.”

“Alone? No one was working the floor with you?”

“No, sir,” Prosky said. “I was alone.”

“Please tell us what happened at twelve-thirty of that night.”

“I opened the door of Mr. Hopper’s office, and I seen him sitting at his desk. Sometimes some of the people there work late, and at first I thought he might be asleep. He was bent over the desk. I decided to wake him before I began to vacuum, and then when I went over to his desk, I seen the bullet hole in the back of his head and blood on his neck and the collar of his shirt, so I know he’s dead.”

“Did you touch anything there in the office?”

“No, sir. I didn’t even plug in the vacuum.”

“And what did you do then?”

“I took the elevator down to the lobby. Frank Goober was at the desk, filling in his charge book. I told him what I had seen, and he called 911, and then he said I should go up and see that nobody entered the office until the cops—I mean police—came, and he’d stay downstairs and let them in.”

“Did you go into the room, into Mr. Hopper’s office, again?”

“No, sir. I stood by the door until the cops came.”

Goober, the next witness, merely confirmed what Prosky said. When the police came, Goober opened the front door for them. He took them up to the seventeenth floor in one of the elevators, and then he and Prosky were told to go back to the lobby and wait for the detectives.

Sitting next to me, Liz reached for my hand under the table. With her small, warm hand in mine, all my doubts vanished and I was suffused with a need to protect her. Aside from me, she had no one in the whole world to turn to. Her father had abandoned her mother and disappeared years ago.

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