Читать книгу Tut! Tut! Mr. Tutt - Arthur Train - Страница 5

It must not be presumed from the foregoing philosophic disquisition that we intend to lay any floral offering upon the bier of William Francis O’Brien’s moral reputation. Far from it! We desire to provide for him no apology, extenuation or excuse; and the reader may perhaps recall that he has hitherto at sundry times been described and figured in other pages as “the yellow dog of the district attorney’s office,” for that was exactly what he was—a legal bulldog or human bloodhound, as you may prefer. One who viewed it as his duty to his God, his country, and himself to convict by any means at his command every hapless defendant brought to the bar of justice.

Through his pertinacity, his resourcefulness, and his lack of scruple he had achieved great notoriety as a prosecutor. Lawyers feared him, defendants shuddered at the mere thought of facing his merciless cross-examination; for he was without consideration to the former or sympathy for the latter. He had no bowels or mercies. To achieve his end he astutely made use of a veneer of apparent honesty, of naïve enthusiasm, that often made him seem to juries merely a blunt, well-meaning blunderer. Yet there was no guile of serpent he did not possess, no venom not in his teeth.

Billy the Bloodhound, as he was called, was a more prominent figure in the Criminal Courts Building than District Attorney John Henry Peckham himself, who was content to have it so, since he shared the widespread belief that there had to be a crook in every law office, whether public or private. In fact, he found O’Brien more than a mere convenience, particularly because he could always count upon him for a conviction in any difficult case. As he used to say to his confidential friends: “If the Bloodhound hasn’t got the necessary evidence—he goes and gets it!”

Hence, because O’Brien was not only an asset but a valuable political go-between, the Honorable John Henry Peckham smothered his personal dislike for the dog and encouraged it to lick his hand. He also was forced to put up with his noise, and his overbearing and swashbuckling ways. For outside the court-room—as well also, to be accurate, sometimes inside it—Billy the Bloodhound was a swaggering, blustering sort of legal bravo—wherever he went preceded, surrounded, and followed by a cohort of sycophants, clerks, process servers, and police officers on special detail, who ran his errands, carried his books, bags, and papers, bought his theatre tickets, did his telephoning, acclaimed his coming and did him lip service—much as we may imagine some Roman senator of the same type to have been accompanied by his bodyguard of lictors who shoved the crowd aside at his approach. All this to Billy the Bloodhound was as the breath of his life, and he played the part, bellowing down the corridors, shouting from the elevators, kicking his slaves in the shins and then handing them out cigars, whispering out of the corner of his mouth about “the big fellow” and “the one next,” with so effective an air of mystery that he had everybody buffaloed; and the crowd all swore among themselves and to him that he was the greatest little man on earth.

He was thickset, bullet-headed, with closely cropped reddish hair and freckly sandy skin, and his short aquiline nose and square chin would have made the features of a cigar-store Indian—alas, poor redskin, he deserves an apology!—seem filled with the milk of human kindness.

Everybody feared and kowtowed to him. People who wanted favors of Peckham went first to placate O’Brien, who was supposed to have the boss in his pocket; cops and detectives sought to have him handle their cases; judges were apt to try to conciliate him as a coming man politically, and as possibly the next district attorney. Whenever a “star case,” a cause célèbre, or any matter attracting public attention came into the office, O’Brien sent to the chief clerk for the papers and grabbed it. He had even been known to send for the papers in a case already assigned to another assistant and grab that too. He gave out interviews to the papers, assumed the office of “acting district attorney” whenever Peckham absented himself, and likewise frequently when the latter was there, and constituted himself pretty much the whole show.

If one stood for him he wasn’t so bad, and if he hadn’t been a crook he might easily have been a power for good instead of a power for evil. It is not easy to overestimate that power, for he was the grand vizier of the most powerful public office-holder in the United States, not even excepting the President himself. He could make or break a cop or blast the reputation of any man in the community at will. This the Honorable William Francis O’Brien!

Alas “the law’s delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes”! What price beside him, poor old Ephraim Tutt?

But wait! There is life in the old dog yet—old Tutt, we mean! So far Billy the Bloodhound has but opened the door and entered the court-room, and Mr. Tutt has but turned to gaze at him. Let us reserve our lamentations until we see what will happen when they meet. Will not the gods lend courage and strength to the kindly old lawyer, who never yet did aught but good, although mayhap he may have done it in queer ways? And who never retired wholly vanquished from the field of honorable battle?

So, heralds, your fanfares! And summon all to the lists to behold the contest between the Bloodhound and the Knight of the Stovepipe Hat. Blow, bugles, blow! Set the echoes of the forum ringing for the legal joust! Court officers, bawl your best, with “Oyez! Oyez!” and “Hear ye! Hear ye!” Pound the railings and shout the honest burghers out of their hats and into their seats, make them move up and on, close the windows, lock the door so that none may escape, and let all who have business in our Honorable Court now with due deference draw near, give your attention, and let Mr. Tutt be heard!