"She was slightly hoarse. I'd stopped her car where there was a pretty good light from a house across the road, and I thought her eyes looked very slightly inflamed. Enough to suggest she might be—oh, perhaps coming down with a cold. You understand, sir, these were very slight things, otherwise I couldn't have let her drive on."
Back of all that, Edith knew—back of the hedging, the slowly chosen words, back of Hunter's questions blunted by the hearsay rule—was the thing that San Giorgio knew and keenly remembered and could not say. Warner's dark eyes had narrowed to cold watchfulness, and Judge Mann's pencil was still. There wasn't any hearsay rule in Mr. Lamson's office. But here in the arena, Carlo San Giorgio couldn't say: "She said she'd had one little shot of brandy. And I said: 'Oh well, Miss, I guess we won't throw the book at you for that.'"
Last night at dinner, Cecil Warner had done some thinking out loud about Trooper San Giorgio, who would have in his own young mind no reasonable doubt. San Giorgio could not repeat Ann's words on the stand. And yet if he could, the Old Man said, it ought (if juries were logical) to make no essential difference. For there was no defense, he said, except a reasonable doubt as to criminal intent. "Reasonable doubt!" he said, and set down his glass because his fat hand was shaking. "You see it, Red? T.J. can say that criminal intent and premeditation are proved up to the hilt by the mere presence of the poison in Cal's apartment. He will. He'll rub their noses in it. Against that and a flock of other circumstantial facts, we've got just one fact, the fact of something that happened in Cal's mind. Is it a fact?"
"You and I both know it, don't we? She had no intent to kill."
But instead of answering directly, the Old Man had said: "Red, do you understand she's not certain of it herself?"
Edith had not quite understood it, until then.
"Did you give her a ticket, Trooper?"
"No, sir. From the address on her driving license I knew she had only about a mile to go. I told her she'd better head straight for home, and I told her I'd follow along behind till she got there, which I did."
The youth was reliving it, Edith saw, and perhaps painfully. A pretty girl, hot night and hazy moon—had he hoped to be invited into the house for a quick check on burglars and a little drink? Oh, probably not. Ann had carried an obvious flag of conventional virtue. San Giorgio would have recognized and respected it, and done no more than a bit of summer's-night dreaming.
"You drove behind her car, as far as the house on Summer Avenue?"