The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom

by Erle Stanley Gardner

  “You said you weel have the keys to both cars.”

  “Didn’t the other man give you his keys when he came in?” She shook her head. “I should have the keys. Sometimes Pancho has to move the cars in the morning so early ones can get out.”

  Mason smiled. “He simply forgot about the keys. His car’s all right. Let it alone.”

  “That other man,” she said, “he has other things to think of—no?”

  And she threw back her head and laughed with a jolly abandon which started her shaking like jelly on a plate.

  Mason nodded, put down his bag, said, “Is it possible for me to make a telephone call from here?”

  “A telephone call, but certainly. Right in the lobby are two booths. You do not notice them?”

  Mason shook his head. “I didn’t see them.”

  “They are not what you call conspeecuous, but they are there—no? You come weeth me. I weel show you.”

  Mason closed the door of his room, followed her into the lobby and saw two doors which might well have opened into rooms, except that each had painted on it a small picture of a telephone.

  “Unfortunately there ees no telephones in the rooms,” she said, “but perhaps the guests down here prefer to sleep anyway. Thees is Mexico, Señor. We do not work all during the day and all during the night the way you people do. When we come home from work in Mexico we are done—no?”

  Mason, preoccupied with his thoughts, merely nodded.

  He entered the phone booth, found a conventional pay station, closed the door, and put through a station-to-station call to Paul Drake’s office. He had to wait in the close confines of the booth for some ten minutes before he had Drake’s office on the line.

  “Drake there?” he asked. “This is Mason calling.”

  “Yes he is, Mr. Mason. Just a moment.”

  A moment later there was a click and Drake’s voice said, “Hello, Perry, where are you?”

  Mason said, “I’m staying at a new hotel in Tijuana. A nice little place called the Vista de la Mesa.”

  “Can I call you there?”

  “Not very well. It’s a pay station here and they close up the joint. I guess they roll up the sidewalks in this end of town. I’m going to bed and get some sleep. This is a pay station. Just a minute and I’ll give you the number.”

  Mason read the number from the disk on the telephone and Drake said, “Okay, I have it. Now wait a minute, Perry, I’ve got something for you.”

  “What?” Mason asked.

  “You wanted us to find out all we could about Ethel Garvin. Well, we’ve struck a lead that may prove promising.”

  “What?”

  “She had a mine in New Mexico. She played around with that for a while and …”

  “I know all about that,” Mason said.

  “Then she went to Reno. She took up a residence there, apparently intending to get a divorce. Something made her change her mind. I haven’t found out yet what it was, but while she was in Reno she became more or less involved with a man by the name of Alman B. Hackley. Does that name mean anything to you?”

  “Not a thing,” Mason said.

  “Well, he has a cattle ranch up there. Apparently he’s a pretty rich chap and quite a playboy. Women went ga-ga over him and Ethel Garvin seems to have fallen in line.

  “She was ‘taking the cure,’ as they call it in that country, and was living at a dude ranch. She did quite a bit of riding and this chap, Hackley, had the adjoining cattle ranch. All of the dude girls who were living at the guest ranch and getting local color along with their six weeks’ change of husbands were nuts over him. Ethel somehow got the inside track. He and Ethel Garvin were together a lot.”

  “Anything serious?” Mason asked.

  “Depends on what you mean by serious,” Drake said, “but something happened. She didn’t go ahead and get her divorce. She stayed there six weeks and didn’t file. She stayed seven weeks, eight weeks, ten weeks, still didn’t file, and then all of a sudden Hackley up and left.”

  “Sell his ranch?” Mason asked.

  “No, he still has this big ranch there, but he came to California. Now here’s a funny one, Mason.”

  “Okay, what is it?”

  “He bought property near Oceanside, about fifty miles north of San Diego. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Not a damn thing so far,” Mason said, “except that I want to find out something about this Hackley. What’s his full name Paul?”

  “Alman, A-l-m-a-n, Bell, B-e-1-1, Hackley, H-a-c-k-l-e-y. I’ve got men searching the records in San Diego and making arrangements to get one of the deputy assessors to go up to the office and open up the assessment rolls. We’ll have him located within an hour or two.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Paul, how did you locate him in California?”

  “I thought he might be here so I traced the new car registrations. It’s something we do all the time.”

  “Well, Hackley will keep until morning,” Mason said, “I’m going to get hold of Garvin first thing in the morning and we’re going to get some of the big stockholders of his company to attend the meeting in person. That will supersede all proxies.”

  “You located him in La Jolla all right?” Drake asked.

  “That’s right. Your man had a good hunch there. I was just about to cover all the hotels when I happened to see them getting out of their car in front of a restaurant right in the center of town. Tell Della where I am and remember to call me here in case anything of prime importance turns up—but you can’t get me until sometime in the morning. I don’t know just when. They close this place up tight at night.”

  “Okay,” Drake said, “I was just about to turn in, myself, Perry. I’ve got things running along smoothly and my investigators are right on the job. You don’t want me to make any approach to any of the parties, do you?”

  “No, just keep digging up information.”

  “Well, I … hold everything, Perry, here’s something just coming in.”

  “Okay, what is it?” Mason asked.

  “A bulletin on this Hackley, and where his ranch is located—you got a pencil there, Perry?”

  “I’ll have one in just a second,” Mason said.

  He took a notebook from his vest pocket and a small automatic pencil, opened the book, and placed it on the shelf under the coin slot of the telephone. He said, “Okay, Paul, go ahead. What is it?”

  Drake said, “You go to Oceanside and right in the center of town there’s a road that turns to the east, with a sign giving the distance to Fallbrook. You turn on that road for about two miles until you come to a mailbox right on the side of the road—the north side. It has the name Rolando, R-o-l-a-n-d-o, C. as in Charles, Lomax, L-o-m-a-x, stenciled on it in black letters. There’s a driveway about three hundred feet beyond that mailbox. You follow it for about a quarter of a mile and it brings you up to Hackley’s house. He purchased it recently, bought it already furnished.”

  “Okay,” Mason said. “Now you have a shadow on Ethel Garvin?”

  “That’s right. I have a man sitting in an automobile and watching the place.”

  “Okay,” Mason said, “I guess that’ll do the job all right. I’ll call you in the morning, Paul.”

  Mason hung up the telephone, left the booth, and said to Señora Miguerinio, who was back at the desk, “Can you tell me the number of my friend’s room? I want to give him a last word before he goes to sleep.”

  “But certainly. It ees down that corridor to the left. It ees right across the patio from your room. The two rooms on the corner, numbaire five and numbaire seex. No?”

  Mason said, “I’ll just run down and tap on the door. Too bad there isn’t a phone.”

  “No, no phone. You see we close at night so we can’t have service at a sweetchboard—no?”

  Mason nodded, went down the corridor, and tapped on the door of number six.

  There was no answer.

  Mason raised his voice, said, “Garvin, just a
minute,” and knocked again.

  Garvin opened the door a crack. “What is it, Mason?” he asked, trying in vain to keep his irritation from registering in his voice.

  Mason said, “I’ve just had a telephone message from Paul Drake, my detective.”

  Garvin opened the door a little wider. “Yes, what is it?”

  “I think we’ve found out the reason your former wife didn’t bother you for a while. His name is Afinan Bell Hackley. At present he’s living on a ranch about two miles east of Ocean-side. He owns a big cattle ranch in Nevada and apparently is quite a Romeo. The girls at the dude ranch which adjoins his property were all ga-ga over him.”

  “What a break!” Garvin said, unable to keep the enthusiasm from his voice. “That’s the sort of stuff we want! Is he living there at Oceanside now, Mason?”

  “On this ranch,” Mason said. “I have directions how to get there.”

  “What are they?”

  Mason gave him the information he had received from Paul Drake. Then he added, “I won’t do anything with him tonight, but tomorrow we’ll start looking him up a bit.”

  Garvin’s right hand came pushing out through the door. “Mason,” he said, “I knew I could depend on you. You’re doing a fine job. It just illustrates what I say. When a man wants a doctor or a lawyer, he wants a good one!”

  From the interior of the bedroom, Lorraine’s voice said, “We’d better not make any offer until we’ve found out about this new evidence. Don’t you think so, Mr. Mason?”

  “I think so,” Mason said. “See you in the morning. Good night.”

  “Good night,” they both called.

  Mason turned away from the door. Garvin closed it and shot the bolt.

  Mason, in order to get to his own room, had to retrace his steps through the lobby.

  As he entered the lobby, Mason found that the bright lights had already been turned off. A single desk light gave illumination to the counter. The lights on the outside had been switched off. There was no sign of Señora Inocente Miguerinio.

  It was at that moment that Mason realized he had left his automatic pencil in the telephone booth.

  Feeling his way cautiously in the dim light across the lobby, Mason opened the door of the booth and was just retrieving his pencil when he heard the voice of a woman in the adjoining phone booth coming through the thin partition.

  “Yes, dear,” Mason heard her say. “You guessed right … Yes, dear, across the border in Tijuana.”

  There were more words Mason couldn’t hear, then the woman’s voice was raised a bit, “Yes, darling … No … I’ll do it … My eyes hurt from watching …”

  Mason gently left the booth, making a note for future reference to be careful of the tin walls which separated the two artistic, but acoustically dangerous telephone booths.

  Mason found his room, closed the door, and started undressing.

  A clock in the patio chimed melodiously, a full set of rich, throaty chimes, then struck the hour—ten o’clock.

  Mason switched out the lights, opened the windows on the west which faced out to what the Señora Inocente Miguerinio had so drastically described as nada, and got into bed.

  Chapter 8

  From somewhere outside the west window there came a series of metallic, strident sounds emanating from some semi-tropical bird Mason could not, for the moment, place.

  But, to add to the strangeness of the phenomenon, the bird seemed to have the habits of the woodpecker and kept up a steady tapping against the side of the building.

  At length Mason’s irritation triumphed over the forces of slumber. The lawyer threw back the covers, sat up in bed and scowled at the window through which could be seen the dry, barren landscape, the first rays of early morning sun turning the mesa to gold.

  At that point the lawyer realized that the steady, persistent tapping was not on the side of his room and was not made by a bird, but was a quiet, persistent tap-tap-tap-tap on his door.

  In bare feet he padded across to the door and opened it.

  A wooden-faced Mexican boy stood on the threshold. “Señor Mason?”

  Mason nodded.

  “Telefono,” the boy said, and moved away, sandaled feet sliding along the waxed red tiles of the floor.

  “Hey, come back here,” Mason said. “Who is it? What…?”

  “Telefono,” the boy called over his shoulder, and kept on walking.

  Mason laughed, then he put on trousers and coat over his pajamas, and, without bothering with socks, thrust his bare feet into his shoes, and in a state of unlaced disarray marched down the corridor to the lobby.

  The lobby was deserted but the door of one of the telephone booths was standing open, and the receiver was off the hook and on the shelf.

  Mason entered the telephone booth, picked up the receiver, and said dubiously, “Hello.”

  An impatient voice said, “Is this Mr. Mason?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Perry Mason?”

  “Yes.”

  “Los Angeles is calling. Hold the line, please.”

  Mason reached out and pulled the door shut. A moment later Paul Drake’s voice on the line said, “Hello, Perry?”

  “Yes,” Mason said, “Hello, Paul.”

  “I’ve had the devil of a time getting you,” Drake said. “I’ve been trying ever since five o’clock this morning. I couldn’t get any answer down there until just a few minutes ago. Then they said they could get you but the talk was in Spanish and had to be relayed, translated and garbled. Why the devil don’t you stay someplace where there’s telephone service?”

  “What’s the trouble?” Mason asked.

  Drake said, “I am up against something that I thought you should know about. One of my men made a mistake. It’s an understandable mistake, but nevertheless it’s resulted in a botched-up job.”

  “What happened?” Mason asked.

  “We’ve lost Ethel Garvin.”

  “The devil you have.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How did it happen?”

  Drake said, “It’s a long story if you want it the long way and the easy way. If you want it the short way and the hard way we lost her, and that’s that.”

  Mason thought for a moment, then said, “Give it to me the long and easy way … No, wait a minute, Paul. The wall between this telephone booth and the next one is thin as paper. Just a moment, let me check. Hold the line.”

  Mason put down the receiver, opened the door of the telephone booth, jerked open the door of the adjoining booth, saw that it was empty, then returned to the telephone and said, “Okay, Paul. I was just checking—I overheard snatches of a telephone conversation last night through the wall of the adjoining booth. Now, tell me what happened.”

  “After ten o’clock,” Drake said, “I cut down to one man. By that time there wasn’t much doing, and not many people going in and out of the apartment house. I told my man to keep an eye on anyone who looked as though he might be important, simply to check license numbers on the cars, times of arrival and times of departure.

  “That’s where I made my mistake, Perry. I tried to have one man do too much work.

  “My man, of course, had his car parked in a good spot right across from the front door of the apartment house. There isn’t a garage in the neighborhood and the tenants leave their cars on the street.”

  “Go ahead,” Mason said, impatiently.

  “You wanted it the long way,” Drake said. “I’m giving it to you. Here’s what happened. A rather well-dressed man, driving a Buick, circled the block, cruising around, evidently looking for a parking place. From the way he acted my man didn’t think he lived in the apartment house. The chap finally found a parking place, turned out the lights, and hurried across to the apartment house. For some reason my operative had a hunch he was about the type that might be calling on our party. He was well dressed and seemed in a hurry, as though he might be trying to keep from being late for an appointment. Putting t
wo and two together, my man decided to go get his license number.

  “As I have explained, my man didn’t dare to drive around to check up on that license number for fear he’d lose his own parking space, so he jumped out of the car and walked rapidly down the block toward the Buick.

  “Well, he’d just got to the Buick when a taxicab swung around the corner and came to a stop in front of the Monolith Apartments. Ethel Garvin must have been in the lobby, waiting. She stepped out of the apartment house door and into the taxi, and they were off—as luck would have it, of course, in the wrong direction.

  “My man sprinted back to his car, jumped in, but was in too much of a hurry to start the bus while the motor was cold, managed to flood the carburetor, and—well, what the hell. He lost her. He knows it was a Yellow Cab, but because it went in the wrong direction, he couldn’t get the number, and that’s that.

  “He hurried to a phone and reported at once to the office. My night man got on the job, covering the Yellow Cabs, trying to find where she’d gone. It took us fifteen or twenty minutes to get that information. By that time it was too late. She’d gone to the garage where she keeps her car, a snappy club coupe that can make miles per hour. She didn’t even mention where she was going. She had an overnight bag with her. She was wearing some sort of a dark outfit, a jacket and a skirt, and my man thinks she had a little hat tipped over on the left side, but he can’t really be certain about that.”

  “What was the time?” Mason asked.

  “Ten-nineteen.”

  “My man started checking in the apartment house. He claimed it was a cab he’d ordered. The clerk at the switchboard insisted she’d telephoned for that taxi, then had come downstairs to wait for it. He said she’d been in the lobby for some three or four minutes. He’s not particularly communicative. In fact right now, what with one thing and another, he’s damned suspicious of the whole setup. Trying to pry information out of him would be like trying to pry into a locked safe with a toothpick.”

  Mason frowned and gave that information consideration.

  “You still on the line?” Drake asked.

  “I’m here,” Mason said. “Did you keep the apartment house covered?”