Kittering was on his feet. “Objected to as incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial,” he said. “It is not a proper question by way of impeachment. It is only when a witness has been convicted of a felony that that point can be brought out on cross-examination.”
Mason said, “I am not trying to impeach the witness. I am trying to show bias.”
“Objection overruled,” Judge Knox said.
“I haven’t been tried on that case,” Serle said, “because there wasn’t any case. The raid was made on a tip-off from Alden Leeds. There wasn’t any evidence.”
“As a matter of fact,” Mason said, “you were shrewd enough to realize that you could ingratiate yourself with the district attorney’s office by changing the time of that telephone conversation from ten-thirty to ten o‘clock, and did so. Now isn’t it a fact that this telephone conversation which you have referred to as taking place at ten o’clock actually did not occur until approximately thirty minutes later?”
“That is not a fact,” Serle shouted.
“And that as you first related that conversation to the officers at headquarters and as you subsequently related it to me there in the Home Kitchen Café, you made no mention of Hogarty telling you that he had a conference in ten minutes which he expected would take about ten minutes?”
Serle shifted his position, but his voice was calm.
“I remembered some of the conversation more clearly after I’d had a chance to think it over. But that’s what Hogarty told me all right... You know how those things are. You don’t remember everything a man says to you over the phone the first time you try to recall the conversation.”
“After you left this apartment house where Conway, or Milicant, had his apartment, you went directly to the All Night and Day Pool Room, did you not?”