Weeks had been leaving for Iowa that morning to visit his parents. He had got up early to see that everything was in order before driving twenty miles to catch an early morning train.
At somewhere between half-past five and six o’clock he had gone to the shed where he kept his car, to see if it held enough gasoline for the trip.
A man ran out of the shed, vaulted the fence, and dashed away down the road. Weeks chased him for a short distance, but the other was too speedy for him. The man was too well-dressed for a hobo: Weeks supposed he had been trying to steal the car.
Since Weeks’s trip east was a necessary one, and during his absence his wife would have only their two sons—one seventeen, one fifteen—there with her, he had thought it wisest not to frighten her by saying anything about the man he had surprised in the shed.
He had returned from Iowa the day before his appearance in the district attorney’s office, and after hearing the details of the Kavalov murder, and seeing Sherry’s picture in the papers, had recognized him as the man he had chased.
We showed him Sherry in person. He said Sherry was the man. Sherry said nothing.
With Weeks’s evidence to refute the San Pedro police’s, the district attorney let the case against Sherry come to trial. Marcus was held as a material witness, but there was nothing to weaken his San Pedro alibi, so he was not tried.
Weeks told his story straight and simply on the witness stand, and then, under cross-examination, blew up with a loud bang. He went to pieces completely.
He wasn’t, he admitted in answer to Schaeffer’s questions, quite as sure that Sherry was the man as he had been before. The man had certainly,