The Death Watch

I had sat in for only an afternoon of William Van Rie’s trial for the murder of Lynn Kaufman before I went to the courthouse on Beacon Hill to wait for the jury’s verdict. Until I saw the Dutch radio operator on the stand I had assumed offhand that he was guilty. When his affair with such an attractively available young woman on the voyage back from Singapore was coming to an end, she might have become hysterical and he in a panic struck her and pushed her through the porthole. So I had thought. But after I watched him that afternoon I was sure he hadn’t done any such thing. As he sat in the witness chair, pallid, engrossed in answering in a foreign tongue, his Adam’s apple bobbling, he was in journalese “fighting for his life.” He told how the police captain after a night of questioning had tricked him into admitting that he had been in the girl’s cabin shortly before her disappearance when he hadn’t been there at all. And somehow I believed him. On the other hand, there didn’t seem any real reason why such a pleasant young woman should have killed herself.

As I walked up from Scollay Square the gaunt building loomed above Beacon Hill like a cubic shadow, its dark bulk scored by a band of light on the seventh floor. After I reached the wax-coated lobby I found myself the only person on the elevator, and I sensed again the almost tangible after-hour emptiness of a great building. It was a relief to find the press room so bustling, with churning typewriters, clicking teletypes, and newspapermen dashing in and out like reincarnations of Richard Harding Davis. Someone in the corner was clipping sentences into a microphone: “This is Art Gardner, speaking to you direct from the Suffolk County courthouse.” The reporters looked busy with a portentous busyness when they were merely lighting cigarettes. Even the three layers of coats looked busy on the racks. A glimpse of four men in shirtsleeves in the alcove playing poker was the final touch. It was like the movies—Front Page, District Attorney. Oscar Wilde was right again—nature imitates art.

FR

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Francis Russell

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I had sat in for only an afternoon of William Van Rie’s trial for the murder of Lynn Kaufman before I went to the courthouse on Beacon Hill to wait for the jury’s verdict. Until I saw the Dutch radio operator on the stand I had assumed offhand that he was guilty. When his affair with such an attractively available young woman on the voyage back from Singapore was coming to an end, she might have become hysterical and he in a panic struck her and pushed her through the porthole. So I had thought. But after I watched him that afternoon I was sure he hadn’t done any such thing. As he sat in the witness chair, pallid, engrossed in answering in a foreign tongue, his Adam’s apple bobbling, he was in journalese “fighting for his life.” He told how the police captain after a night of questioning had tricked him into admitting that he had been in the girl’s cabin shortly before her disappearance when he hadn’t been there at all. And somehow I believed him. On the other hand, there didn’t seem any real reason why such a pleasant young woman should have killed herself.

As I walked up from Scollay Square the gaunt building loomed above Beacon Hill like a cubic shadow, its dark bulk scored by a band of light on the seventh floor. After I reached the wax-coated lobby I found myself the only person on the elevator, and I sensed again the almost tangible after-hour emptiness of a great building. It was a relief to find the press room so bustling, with churning typewriters, clicking teletypes, and newspapermen dashing in and out like reincarnations of Richard Harding Davis. Someone in the corner was clipping sentences into a microphone: “This is Art Gardner, speaking to you direct from the Suffolk County courthouse.” The reporters looked busy with a portentous busyness when they were merely lighting cigarettes. Even the three layers of coats looked busy on the racks. A glimpse of four men in shirtsleeves in the alcove playing poker was the final touch. It was like the movies—Front Page, District Attorney. Oscar Wilde was right again—nature imitates art.