“I’m not!” Dean stormed at him, getting redder yet. “But you barge into me with sudden questions and it knocks me off my base.”
Clever! His winning smile and his sudden carrying of the war into the enemy’s quarters succeeded, as I was sure he had hoped, in diverting the jury’s attention from his palpable mendacity.
“Then you heard no boat?” Hart went back to his subject.
“I heard a motor boat, but that was about twelve o’clock,” Dean said, reminiscently. “I heard none later, for I went to sleep then.”
He had himself perfectly in hand, now, and though I confidently believed he had seen Alma Remsen in her canoe, I knew, too, that wild horses couldn’t drag the fact from him.
“And you heard no further noises?”
“Not till morning, when Everett rapped on my door, and told me to get up.”
There seemed to be nothing more to get out of young Dean, and he was dismissed. He had made a good effect on the jury, I could see that. Since they didn’t have my knowledge of the girl in the boat, they were not greatly interested in the vague sounds mentioned by Everett.
In fact, I could gather from the whole trend of the inquest that suspicion centred on the inmates of the house. There was little thought given to the outer world.
Then Alma Remsen was called.