Chapter Fourteen The first words that Ross spoke in a courtroom in the course of the Lucas case were intended to stall his client''s trial. He was making his argument on March 26 at the case''s Preliminary Hearing before Magistrate Thomas Elmore in one of the courtrooms on City Hall''s first floor set aside for Magistrates. The Preliminary Hearing was pretty much exclusively Bull''s show, an occasion when the prosecution was required to present to the court just enough evidence to convince Magistrate Elmore to send the case on to Ontario''s Supreme Court for a full-scale trial in front of a High Court judge. But before Bull began his pitch to Elmore, Ross rose and argued his request that the Magistrate postpone the Preliminary Hearing for at least a month. Elmore, anxious to push the case along, wanted reasons from Ross. Why should Elmore take an urgent and widely publicized murder hearing off its fixed schedule? Why in the world would he make such an unlikely ruling? Ross offered two arguments. He told Elmore he had taken over Lucas''s defence just two weeks earlier. He needed many more weeks to analyze the Crown''s case, interview witnesses, and build his defence.

Elmore listened attentively enough, but when Ross finished, Elmore shook his head. The rush to trial might be tough on Ross, he said, but that wasn''t sufficient reason to bring the process to such a long halt. Ross would just need to work faster and harder. These weren''t Elmore''s exact words, but it was what he implied in ruling that the Preliminary Hearing would get along as scheduled. Ross tried out his second argument on Elmore. He reminded the Magistrate, as if anyone in the criminal law business needed reminding, that a highly publicized Royal Commission on Crime was sitting during those very weeks, taking testimony and compiling files on the ever spreading and deeper penetrating volume of crime in Ontario. Ross''s point was that the Lucas hearing needed to be postponed until the air was cleared of the Commission''s unceasing chatter about murder and drugs and prostitution, much of it supposedly generated by American gangsters. It was media reporting of this sort that whipped up a public bias against the much put upon Arthur Lucas.

Magistrate Elmore shook his head again. Nice try, Mr. Mackay, he said in effect. He ruled against Ross''s argument, and directed Henry Bull to call his first witness. Preliminary Hearings were meant to be speedy and efficient, and Bull squeezed the Lucas case into one day, March 26, and most of the morning of the next day. Bull put more than a dozen witnesses on the stand. He began with Frank McGuire, the Post Office employee who discovered Crater''s body, and continued on through Michael Lundy, the manager of the Waverley Hotel who placed Lucas in Toronto on the night of the murders. Bull called several police officers from both Detroit and Toronto who had interviewed witnesses and uncovered such potentially meaningful physical exhibits as the battered Ivor Johnson revolver found on the Burlington Skyway.

Among the other witnesses, Bull drew testimony from Morris "Red" Thomas. Ross looked on Thomas as especially dangerous for Lucas''s cause, the only witness who tied Lucas into the drug trade and one of the two witnesses, along with Wesley "the Kid" Knox, who identified the Ivor Johnson revolver as Lucas''s gun. For the Crown, linking Lucas to commerce in drugs was, if not crucial to the case, then at least helpful in the extreme. According to the theory Bull and the cops were depending on, Crater was murdered to prevent him from testifying against Gus Saunders in the Saunders trial on drug trafficking charges in Detroit. It made sense to assume that the murderer, assigned to the killing job by Saunders, came from Detroit''s drug culture. Hence, the tighter Bull''s prosecution could fit Lucas into the world of heroin and cocaine, the stronger the case against Lucas grew. All of which made Red Thomas, as well as Kid Knox, key witnesses at the Lucas trial. Thomas was a guy Ross needed to cut down to size.

(One irony in the connections of all the Detroit underworld characters was that, even without Crater testifying at the eventual trial of Gus Saunders in June 1962, the jury in the case found him guilty, and the judge thumped Saunders with a hefty sentence of twenty years.) It was with Ross''s cross-examination of Thomas that he rang up a small success. Ross''s principal business during the Preliminary Hearing was, overall, to absorb the gist of the case Bull intended to make later in much more detail at the trial and, in particular, to take careful note of Bull''s list of witnesses. For the most part, Ross left the Crown witnesses alone throughout the Preliminary, not cross-examining them, just soaking up their answers to Bull''s examinations-in-chief and jotting down the occasional note of the answers. But when Thomas testified and brought up the subject of his supposed heroin-peddling expedition to Chicago with Lucas, Ross chose to take a whack at Thomas''s strength as a witness. After Bull finished his questions for Thomas, Ross rose, gathered himself and got right into his cross-examination at Thomas''s most vulnerable point of attack. Ross read out in court the man''s spectacular record of criminal convictions, his list of sentences served for such crimes as possession of narcotics, parole violations and pieces of thievery. Ross asked Thomas if he recognized this wicked catalogue of transgressions? And did he think it reflected well on a witness who was asking to be believed in his testimony in court against another man? Thomas got fidgety under the persistence of Ross''s cross-examination.

He retreated a little, moderating his testimony around the edges. He finally admitted that maybe he misremembered the Chicago trip, maybe Lucas wasn''t a participant in that particular drug deal after all. Thomas continued to insist that Lucas bought and sold drugs, though not during the time in Chicago. This was more than good enough for Ross. He ended the cross-examination and sat down. With the concession from Thomas, Ross had notched a confidence-lifting success, nothing colossal, but all successes counted for something. Nobody who knew the stolid-faced Arthur Lucas would ever accuse him of giving in to fits of euphoria, but on the second morning of the preliminary hearing, he seemed unusually happy to see Ross. Lucas said he had very good news.

Earlier that morning, he had spotted a familiar face in the corridor outside the prisoners'' cells in City Hall though he had no idea what the man''s name was. Lucas asked a duty guard to identify the guy Lucas pointed at. No problem, the guard said, the man Lucas was indicating happened to be a police sergeant by the name of John Fallis. Lucas told Ross he knew where and when he had seen Fallis before; it was in Wong''s Restaurant on Dundas Street early at breakfast time on November 17, the morning of the murders. Fallis was eating there, and he couldn''t have missed Lucas who was the only black man in the place that morning. Ross had already pumped the waiter who served Lucas at Wong''s on the November morning, asking if he recalled Lucas ordering breakfast at seven or just after. If anyone could place Lucas in the restaurant around that time, the sighting could provide an alibi for Lucas at the moment of the killings or very close to it. But Ross drew a blank with Wong''s waiter.

This waiter, a Chinese man who up until that moment spoke perfect English, seemed suddenly to have forgotten the language. Now Ross had a second possible alibi witness. He approached Sergeant Fallis and explained his mission on behalf of his client. Ross wanted Fallis to testify for Lucas in court. "I can''t help you," Fallis said, giving Ross a dead-eyed look. oss took a shot at making his argument one more time, but Fallis had already turned away. Ross gave in. Fallis wasn''t going to come to the aid of an accused murderer, a man Fallis''s fellow police investigators were all set to convict of the crime.

Ross knew it was pointless to subpoena Fallis for an appearance before Magistrate Elmore. Fallis would only claim he couldn''t remember where he had breakfast that morning way back in November. He''d be as useless as the waiter. The Preliminary Hearing ended on the morning of March 27 in just the way everybody in the courtroom expected it to. Elmore ruled that the case of Regina v Lucas would proceed to the Supreme Court of Ontario. The trial would begin on Monday, April 30, before Chief Justice James McRuer. As Ross prepared for the trial, interviewing his client at the Don multiple times and in multiple particulars, he grew convinced that Lucas was presenting a totally believable account of himself in relation to the murders, something that could play well in court. Lucas struck Ross as no dummy.

Though almost totally uneducated, he had an intuitive kind of intelligence that placed him several rungs above the "moron" category that the American prison psychologist had consigned him to years earlier. There was no hesitancy in Lucas''s recital of his story. Even better, the account Lucas gave Ross deviated not at all from the version he first told the Detroit Police Inspector, Russell McCarty, at the cop shop on Beaubien Street. Lucas wasn''t making the story up as he went along, trimming the narrative to fit new or changing facts. He had one version, and he repeated it exactly the same way each time he was asked to explain what happened at 116 Kendal Avenue. Ross had his own theory to explain the events of the murder, its motive, execution and all other related factors and elements. There was nothing complicated about the theory, just an accounting that cast Lucas in the tale as an unwitting stalking horse. The theory began in the same place.