The Valentino Affair Read Online Free PDF Page A

comment about so narrowly avoiding passage aboard the Lusitania, and her wish to have perished in the tragedy. “Is it not a fact that when you first heard of the sinking you and De Saulles were with Mrs. Mooney and that De Saulles said he wished he had been aboard the Lusitania?”
    “I don’t remember.” 30 This time Blanca’s stock answer to so many questions sounded thin and unconvincing. No doubt about it; she had been caught out.
    Weeks began to press. After Jack had offered her a divorce if she so desired and she had sailed for Chile, she wrote a letter thanking him for his flowers and kind words. “Do you mean to say that when you wrote that your married life was at an end?”
    “At an end, morally.” 31
    “Will you please be frank and tell us what you mean by that? Did you mean that you wouldn’t live with him as man and wife?”
    “I thought that as I was leaving him, I wouldn’t.” 32
    Blanca was a canny operator. Whenever the questioning became too pointed for comfort, she would look pleadingly at Justice Manning, and he would ease her distress with a few kind words, encouraging her to take her time and not to be nervous. Blanca’s palpable effect on the judge was echoed in Weeks’s next line of questioning, an attempt to show just how comfortable she was in the company of other men. Blanca reluctantly admitted that she had attended several social functions on her own, but only with a “heavy heart.” 33
    Abruptly, Weeks switched to events on the morning after the shooting, when Blanca was in a supposedly dazed state. He asked if she recalled phoning Frederic R. Coudert, asking him to call on her at the jail, that he had done so, and that she had selected, at his recommendation, the firm of Uterhart & Graham to represent her.
    “I don’t recall seeing him at that time.” 34
    Weeks looked incredulous. “You don’t recall my walking into the woman’s part of the jail that morning and finding you at a table with Suzanne Monteau, your maid, across the table from you and when I found you reading a newspaper?”
    “I do not.” 35
    “Do you remember reading that Mr. Uterhart said that he would ‘acquit this woman’ . . . or hand his certificate of admission to the judge?”
    “I didn’t read that,” she said, smiling across at her lawyer, who smiled right back.
    Weeks next raised the exhaustive biography that had been delivered to the papers within forty-eight hours of the killing. “Didn’t you give all that information to your lawyer in the conference you had with him immediately after the shooting?”
    “I don’t recollect it. I have no knowledge of any talk with Mr. Uterhart then.” 36 Her first claimed memory of meeting Uterhart came on August 13, ten days after the shooting. Nor could she remember phoning Mrs. Roma M. Flint and asking her to bail her maid out. Then Weeks produced a check, payable to the order of Mrs. Flint. It was dated August 4. “Do you recall drawing that check?” Weeks handed her the check. She studied it for several moments.
    “No, I do not.”
    “You know that it was used as the cash bail resulting in the release of your maid, Suzanne Monteau, don’t you?”
    “I think I heard of it later.” 37
    It had been an arduous morning, and as the recess hour drew near, one of the jurors, retired firefighter Alexander Norton, yawned audibly. The crowd tittered and Weeks suggested to the judge that the jury must be getting tired and that maybe it was time to break for lunch. To general astonishment Blanca broke in. “I should think anybody would be tired.” 38
    Weeks spun around. It had taken more than two hours, but at long last a flash of emotion colored his face. “Are you tired?” he barked at the witness.
    “No, I don’t blame the juror for being tired, though.”
    “Are my questions tiresome to you?”
    “Yes.”
    This brought a gasp in court.
    “Do they bore you? Do you think I should not ask you about these things?”
    “Oh, no, Mr. Weeks. I