The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom

by Erle Stanley Gardner

  “But I want to be there, Mason. I must be there. If I should lose control of that company …”

  “You just sit tight,” Mason said, “and quit worrying. Don’t do anything. Don’t talk with anyone. Don’t stir out of the hotel until I can have a chance to see you, and if anyone should find you, then don’t answer any questions. Simply refuse to say a word until you’ve seen me.”

  “But, hang it, Mason, that will put me in a false light.”

  “I can’t help that, Garvin. There are a lot of angles to this thing that you don’t know anything about yet. Now listen carefully. I want you to answer questions, and I want you to be very careful about your nouns.”

  “What do you mean, nouns?”

  “I mean nouns,” Mason said. “A noun is an object. Now listen to this. The other morning when you were standing in your office you looked out of your window and noticed something on the fire escape, some object?”

  “On the fire escape?”

  “Yes, a metallic object, something heavy.”

  “Oh, yes, I remember. Why, yes, I pointed out this …”

  “Careful,” Mason warned. “Let’s keep the conversation on an ambiguous note, if possible, and remember that the walls of that telephone partition you’re talking from are paper-thin. The front door is all right but the wall between that and the other telephone booth is just like paper. Now, what happened to that object?”

  “Livesey crawled out of the window and picked it up. We talked about it and I … I told Livesey to put it in the glove compartment of my car. He said he was going out to get a cup of coffee, and I wanted to look the thing over—to tell you the truth, Mr. Mason, I’d entirely forgotten about that … that object. It must be in the car now.”

  “Go out and take a look and see if it is,” Mason said.

  “Right now?”

  “Right now. Just leave the receiver off the hook and go out and take a look. I’ll hold the line. Your car’s still in front?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” Mason said, “this is important. You didn’t turn your car keys in to the woman who runs the hotel last night?”

  “No, I forgot. I intended to. I put them in my pocket and … but it was all right. They didn’t need to move the car.”

  “That’s all right. The keys stayed in your pocket all night?”

  “Why, yes, of course.”

  “The car wasn’t moved?”

  “No, certainly not.”

  “And the doors were locked?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Why, of course. The car’s just where I left it last night when I went to bed.”

  Mason said, “Go on out and take a look and tell me if that object is still there.”

  “All right,” Garvin said. “Hold the phone.”

  Mason waited, holding the phone, drumming impatiently with his finger tips on the edge of the desk for some fifteen seconds until he could hear over the phone the noise made by Garvin’s pounding feet as he hurried back toward the telephone. There was the sound of the receiver being moved, then Garvin’s excited voice, “It’s gone, Mason, it’s gone!”

  “All right,” Mason said, “now when did it go?”

  “My gosh, it must have been taken before we left Los Angeles. No one could have taken it out here.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Well, of course—hang it, Mason, how do I know? All I know is that it’s gone—I know that Livesey put it in there.”

  “Did you look in the glove compartment after …”

  “Yes. Right after I came downstairs I looked in the glove compartment to make certain that Livesey had put it there. It was there.”

  “And when did you next look in the glove compartment?”

  “Just now. That’s the only time I’ve had it open … Wait a minute, no. Hold everything, Mason, Lorraine looked in there shortly after we got started. I told her to open the glove compartment and get out my sunglasses. I wanted to put them on.”

  “Where’s Lorraine?”

  “Right here. Right out in the lobby. Just a minute.”

  “Don’t get excited and say anything where people can hear you,” Mason cautioned. “Get her in the phone booth with you.”

  “Okay.”

  Mason could hear the sound of a door opening and low-voiced conversation. Then Garvin said, “She’s here.”

  “All right,” Mason said. “Ask her if she remembers looking in the glove compartment for your dark glasses and …”

  “I already have,” Garvin said. “She says that she got my glasses out of the glove compartment all right, but that an object such as you mention was not in there.”

  “But you know it was in there when you came downstairs?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you drive the car away immediately then?”

  “I … no, wait a minute. I went into the cigar counter to get some cigars and I shook a game of twenty-six with the girl at the counter. Then I got in the car and drove out and picked up my wife. She had the baggage all packed and we got started right away.”

  Mason said, “All right. Sit tight. Hold everything until I get down there. I’ll be there before dark.”

  Chapter 11

  Garvin was pacing the floor of the lobby of the Vista de la Mesa Hotel when Mason arrived. Garvin jerked around at the sound of the opening door as though he had been pulled by a string, saw Mason’s face, and then his own features lighted up in a genial smile.

  “Thank heavens you’re here, Mason,” he said. “I thought you never would get here. What’s new?”

  Mason said, “We’ve just come from the stockholders’ meeting.”

  “How did things go?”

  “Like clockwork,” Mason told him. “Some man by the name of Smith started a revolt but it died aborning. The stockholders put the same board of directors in office for another year, elected all the same officers, and the directors organized, after the stockholders’ meeting, for the new year, employed you for another year as general manager at the same salary and bonus, and I gather that everything you’ve done has been duly ratified.”

  “That’s fine,” Garvin said. “Now tell me about Ethel, Mason. My heavens, this is awful. I’ve been having the damnedest ideas. What happened? Did she commit suicide?”

  “Apparently not. Apparently it was murder.”

  “But who could have killed her?”

  “That’s a question that’s bothering the police. Where’s your wife?”

  “In her room.”

  Mason said, “Suppose we all go down there. I’ll get Della Street.”

  Mason called Della Street from the limousine; then, together with Garvin, they walked down the corridor. Garvin tapped on the door of the room and Lorraine’s voice called, “Come in.”

  Garvin opened the door and said, “Well, he’s here, Lorrie.”

  “Thank heaven!” she said, and came toward him smiling cordially, giving him her hand. “Mr. Mason, I can’t begin to tell you how much it means to me to have you here. I’ve been worrying and Edward has been simply frantic.”

  “Thank you,” Mason said. He presented Della Street to Mrs. Garvin and said, “The stockholders’ meeting and the meeting of the new board of directors is all out of the way. Everything moved along smoothly. There was no trouble at all. I had thought perhaps that there might have been an organized revolt planned, that the substitution of Ethel’s name on those proxies wasn’t simply a piece of isolated, personal skulduggery. I thought that perhaps it might mask something more sinister. As nearly as I could tell from checking the names of the stockholders, there were a lot of stockholders present who weren’t ones that we’d called.

  “Della Street called that list you gave her this morning and nearly all of them showed up. I guess there was enough friendly stock there to control the meeting; but, for the life of me, I don’t know why some of those other people showed up. It was a peculiar situation.”

&nbs
p; “Anyhow, we can quit worrying about that,” Garvin said. “It probably was all right. Let’s get down to news of this tragedy, Mason.”

  Mason said, “I’m going to be blunt about this thing, Garvin. You’re not a widower. That doesn’t affect your status as having committed bigamy when you went through that marriage ceremony in Mexico. I don’t want you to go back to the United States. I know that it may look a little callous for you to stay over here and refuse to go to the funeral of your ex-wife, but nevertheless I want you to play it that way. There are a lot of things I can’t tell you about right now.”

  “I want to know the details,” Garvin said. “Good Lord, Mason, I’ve been biting my fingernails down to the knuckles. Tell me, how did it happen?”

  Mason said, “I had a detective shadowing her. She left her apartment at ten-nineteen. She probably received a telephone call from someone shortly before she left. She ditched my shadow. The next contact we had was when we found her sitting in her car about two miles south of Oceanside on a mesa, a vacant lot. Someone had shot her with a .38 caliber revolver. One shot on the left side of the head.

  “Now that .38 caliber revolver is probably the same one that you found out on the fire escape a couple of days ago. I’m going to have to ask you some questions. They’re going to hurt but we’ve got to go through with it. The police are going to ask you those same questions. I want to hear your answers before the police hear them.”

  “Go right ahead. Ask anything you want,” Garvin said. “As far as that revolver is concerned …”

  “I think I’ve checked up on the revolver pretty well,” Mason said. “What I want to check up on now is you.”

  “On me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “Where was I? Why, you were with me. You drove in here. You went across the border with me. You …”

  “You went in your room and then what did you do?”

  “I went to bed.”

  “You stayed in there all night?”

  “Why, yes, of course.”

  “Didn’t go out for any purpose?”

  “No, certainly not.”

  “How about it, Mrs. Garvin?” Mason asked. “Can you swear to that?”

  “Why, certainly,” she said indignantly.

  “Now, don’t get hot under the collar,” Mason warned. “I’m simply closing the thing up so the police won’t find any loop-holes. Now, did you folks go to sleep, say around midnight?”

  “Probably before that.”

  “Do you sleep soundly?”

  “I don’t sleep too soundly,” Garvin said. “My wife is quite a sound sleeper.”

  “That’s bad,” Mason said.

  “I don’t see anything bad about it,” she said.

  “You can’t give him an alibi.”

  “I certainly can. As it happens I woke up—oh, right around one o’clock. Edward was snoring. I told him to roll over on his side. I had to speak to him twice before he did, but he rolled over on his side and then quit snoring. I went back to sleep. I will admit that I sleep very heavily, but at times I’m an intermittent sleeper. I didn’t know anything after that until about half past two or quarter to three. I woke up then and was awake until after quarter past three.”

  “How do you know about the time?” Mason asked.

  She said, “I heard a clock chime the hour at one o’clock and when I woke up and was awake for about half an hour I not only heard the clock chime three o’clock but I looked at my wrist watch. In fact, I got up and took a glass of water and an aspirin. I had a slight headache and felt a little restless. Then I went back to sleep.”

  Mason heaved a sigh of relief and said, “Well, that’s fine. I just wanted to be sure that you have an absolute ironclad alibi. Now let’s get back to the question of that gun …”

  “That gun definitely was not in the glove compartment, Mr. Mason,” Lorraine Garvin said. “I looked in there to get some sunglasses for Edward.”

  “When was that?”

  “Very shortly after we’d left Los Angeles. It had been a little cloudy, and then the sun came out and was quite brilliant and Edward wanted his dark glasses. I opened the door of the glove compartment and the glasses were in a case toward the back of the compartment. Now that you mention about the gun, I remember thinking that everything had been pushed toward the back part of the glove compartment and wondered why. It was as though some other object had occupied the front of the compartment for a little while. But it certainly wasn’t there when I got those glasses. There were just some maps and a small flashlight, a pair of pliers, and this case with Edward’s sunglasses.”

  “No gun?”

  “Definitely not.”

  Mason said to Garvin, “But you’re certain the gun was in the glove compartment?”

  “It certainly was, and I guess the only time when it could have been removed was when I was out in front of my house waiting for my wife. She had the baggage all packed and I went in and got the baggage and then …”

  “And then we had a bottle of beer,” Lorraine said. “You remember that you wanted to have some beer. You said you were thirsty so we went back to the icebox and had a bottle of beer.”

  “That’s right,” Garvin said.

  “And during this time the car wasn’t locked up?”

  “Heavens, no,” Garvin said. “As a matter of fact I almost didn’t shut off my motor. Lorraine said she had the baggage all ready and I went in and got it and it wasn’t until after I got in the house that I thought about the beer. Lorraine joined me. We went back to the icebox, opened a bottle and split it in two glasses. Now someone could have taken the gun out at that time.”

  “Someone who had followed you for that specific purpose?” /Mason asked.

  “I don’t think so, Mason. I doubt if anyone could have done that. It would have been more apt to have been kids in the neighborhood.”

  “It wasn’t kids in the neighborhood,” Mason said. “Whoever got that gun, got it for a specific, deliberate purpose. That was the gun that was used in killing your former wife.”

  “They’re absolutely certain about that?” Garvin asked.

  “They will be as soon as they recover the fatal bullet and then shoot a test bullet through the gun and make a series of tests with a comparison microscope. But you can gamble a thousand to one that it was that gun which did the job.”

  “That, of course, complicates things,” Garvin admitted. “I suppose police might even discover my fingerprints on that gun.”

  “You handled it?”

  “I handled it, Denby handled it, and Livesey handled it. And whoever put it out on the fire escape must have handled it. In other words there must be quite a few fingerprints on it.”

  “I suppose so,” Mason said. “The police aren’t taking me into their confidence.”

  “The body was found near Oceanside,” Lorraine Garvin said significantly.

  “That’s right,” Mason said. “We haven’t interviewed Hackley yet. The police don’t know anything at all about him. I’m going to have a car drive me back to Oceanside. Paul Drake is going to meet me there.”

  “Paul Drake?” Lorraine asked.

  “The detective who’s been working with me. The one who located Ethel Garvin for me. He’s a good man.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Garvin said, “I can’t help but say that I consider it highly significant that she drove to Oceanside—if that is where her lover is living.”

  “We don’t know he’s her lover. We don’t know very much about him,” Mason said. “He may be a tough nut to crack. The only satisfaction we have to date is that we know about him and the police don’t. It is, of course, significant that she went to Oceanside. There are a couple of other angles in the case that indicate she may have gone to keep an appointment with this man, and …”

  From the patio outside came the sound of the voice of Señora Inocente Miguerinio. “Thees place ees very old
,” Señora Miguerinio said, “muy viejo—old, you understand, like the ruinas. My father, and before him my grandfather, have owned thees place. Now I have feex heem up so the turista have a place to sleep, no?”

  “I see,” a man’s voice answered.

  “An old estate, a hacienda,” Señora Miguerinio went on.

  The masculine voice said, “I am glad to know it. Two years ago when I was here, I did not notice it.”

  “Of course you deed not notice. Ees so much ruin that my father make a board fence so he ees hid, no?”

  “No,” the man said.

  Señora Miguerinio’s laughter was like bubbling water. “Ah, well, the turista love to stay in my old Spanish house, inside ees very old, ees what you call quaint, no?”

  “Yes.”

  “Si, Señor, ees quaint. You speak my language, no?”

  “No, only a few words.”

  “You weel come in and sit down, no?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  Mason glanced at the grinning Garvin, frowned and placed his finger to his lips in a gesture for silence.

  The man’s voice came through the open window. “You have a Señor Edward Garvin and his wife staying here? He owns that big convertible in the driveway.”

  “Oh, but certainly. The Señor Garvin, and the Señora. She ees beautiful, with the hair like red gold. And they have their fren’ the Señor Perry Mason weeth them.”

  “The devil!” the voice exclaimed in irritaition.

  Mason walked over close to Garvin. “That voice,” he said, “is the voice of Lieutenant Tragg, of the Metropolitan police force. And if you don’t think he’s a smart cookie, just stick around.”

  Señora Miguerinio said, “They are een these rooms now. Five and seex. If you are a fren’ of theirs they weel be glad to see you, no?”

  “No,” Lieutenant Tragg said.

  They heard a door close, then steps in the hallway, knuckles on the door. Mason opened the door.

  “Well, well, Tragg! How are you?”