“I?” he questioned wonderingly. “You mean—my having inducted Harry Seeong, with his magic fingers and his devilish hip-shooting, into this case!”
“No, John,” Elsa returned quickly. “Harry Seeong had nothing whatever to do with your saving Colby’s Nugget. This court, John, was an official court of law tonight. Not only up to the very minute Judge Penworth gave his verdict on you, but up to the very minute he committed suicide. Its every word was made a matter of official registry. And eventual suicide—or no eventual suicide—by Penworth, his decision was the decision of a sitting criminal judge. And decreed that my personal fortunes should not be depleted by a certain $100,000! That’s all.”
“I hadn’t thought of that, really,” he admitted. “For I keep thinking of him as a vicious gangster.”
“His decision, then,” she pointed out, “against me—against you, rather—would have turned my assignment into a quitclaim so valid that all the wild horses of the law could not have—But now,” she broke off, “that you’ve saved my fortune for me, what—what on earth can I do for you?”
“Do for me!” he repeated wonderingly. “Why, heavens, Elsa, whatever was done in this courtroom tonight, that may have saved somebody’s real estate from the clutches of a grasping shark, was done by the owner of that real estate herself! A brilliant, resourceful little red-head—who pulled one of the cleverest legal clearances on record. Why, Elsa, infant, you’ll go down in criminological history, in the way you proved, at the last desperate minute the last legal ditch—the last hurdle—that I didn’t have a Chinaman’s skull on me at all. You, Elsa, are a darned fine criminal lawyer, and when some day I get into some real trouble—”
She shook her head. “Don’t ever get into any real trouble. Of course, you weren’t in any real trouble tonight. ’Twas I who was in trouble! In your case, we both know now that, convicted or not convicted of those charges, you would never have had to go to the chair. For even though your plan had failed, long before that execution date, you would have called upon Wah Lung to come forward—and he would have both alibied you, and identified you—and identified that skull as well—and your sentence would have been set aside. Though, I must admit, you would have received, in its place, a contempt-of-court sentence that—”
“—that would have been the king of all contempt sentences, eh?”
“And how, John. And—how!”
He smiled ruefully. “Well, Elsa, I don’t think I was ever in very great danger even of that. For Wah Lung—who’s somewhere in that next room there now, I believe—has been a hundred per cent. convinced, for the last twelve and a half years—ever since, in fact, Wah Lee’s badly delayed letter reached him, and he traced down those Ivy-199 numbers—that Judge Penworth was the ‘fingerman’ in that kidnapping. And the inside ‘wire,’ as well. For the whole other nine numbers—oh, yes, Elsa, Wah Lung, through that chap Dong Fu, the clerk in the Records Department of the phone company, ran down the whole ten numbers, and not just ‘seven’ as I declared tonight!—you see, I purposely told Penworth tonight, in open court there, that Wah Lung failed to obtain the identities of the holders of the 3 Ivy-199 numbers having the additional terminations of 1, 5, and 9, so that Penworth, who actually had had Ivy 1995, could feel safely on the outside of our seven dangerous numbers—but anyway, Elsa, as I started to say ’way, ’way back, the other nine Ivy-199 numbers were persons who just simply couldn’t have been of that gang. But Penworth—who’d had Ivy 1995 that day Wah Lee was rung in the hospital—Penworth!—in touch, as a criminal judge, not only with criminals galore, but with police, police reporters, all the sources for inside tips on impending police moves—he was the one who assuredly could have been the ‘inside wire.’ But—”
“But how on earth, John, do you suppose he ever got involved with that McGurk gang?”
“How! Well, Mr. Vann dropped a pretty good hint about that, about ten minutes ago, in the other room there—when talking to me and to that star-reporter of the Sun who was catapulted down here to mop up. Penworth, Vann says, as a lawyer, once went to Australia—oh, at least eighteen years ago, Elsa—in connection with some gold mine he and some other Chicagoans had bought into. To locate a number of miners whose signatures were necessary to clear the title to the mine. And came away eventually with all the signatures. But Venus Baldy—our own dear Mullins of tonight—had been, so Vann says, a forger as well as many other things in Australia. And there’s no doubt that Venus forged, for Penworth, some miner’s name who couldn’t be located, but was probably dead. And then, years later, when Venus escaped the noose there—and eventually wound up in Chicago—he must have gone straight to Penworth, the crooked American lawyer—now a sitting judge—to get staked. Then, eventually, Venus Baldy obviously nosed into the McGurk gang. And thus, finally brought McGurk and Penworth together. Into a new relationship: kidnapping. And then, subsequently—when the McGurk gang got pretty badly broken up—Venus probably forced Penworth to put him in downtown as his court-clerk and bailiff. For Penworth, it seems, has never had any money—and wouldn’t have been bleedable for a penny. And so still later, when Venus’ ‘chieftain’ temporarily retired from the downtown bench, Venus just retired with him. That’s all.”
“I see,” Elsa nodded. “Boy!—but that had me puzzled—and how. For it—but you were saying, John, just as I interrupted you, that Mr. Wah Lung came to the conclusion, twelve and a half years ago, that Penworth and Penworth only could have been the ‘inside wire’ on the kidnapping of his own son. And—so now go on.”
“Yes. But, of course, Elsa, ’twould have been the height of folly for Wah Lung ever to have openly made charges. A Chinese restaurant keeper’s—against an eminent jurist? Why—the ensuing libel suit would have swept away his restaurant and everything he had, and he himself would have been driven out of town. And, even as he ingenuously explained in court tonight—though without, of course, naming the individual in question—the bringing of such charges would have hurt every one of Wah Lung’s own countrymen in Chicago who did business with whites. And even if Wah Lung could have achieved a surreptitious opening of that old Richard Lionshead and Company safe, which he had more than once seen in Penworth’s own room while visiting and studying unworth—for, of course, he cultivated Penworth after his discovery about the Ivy-1995 business—even if, as I said, he could have achieved an opening of that Richard Lionshead safe—which he couldn’t, since Harry Seeong, born in Chicago’s Chinatown, was only in the process of growing up, and of becoming the fine lock expert he is today—it would have availed Wah Lung quite nothing. Nothing, that is, until that skull was stolen last night, when—”
“Though not so unavailing at that,” Elsa qualified. “For some of the ‘hot money’ was in there?”
“Yes, but Wah Lung didn’t know that. For no one could ever have dreamed that Penworth would have held on to any ‘hot money!’ And even if, Elsa, his safe had been forcibly opened by a brigade of policemen—which couldn’t ever have taken place—Penworth could still smilingly have explained the ‘hot money’ as something passed to him by some repentant criminal in exchange for a modified sentence—and which he, Penworth, in turn was holding to turn back to Wah Lung some day when Wah might start to go under financially. Hot money, it seems, Elsa, can always be ‘explained’—and, as conviction evidence per se, is, so Vann says, absolutely n.g.
“No, Elsa,” Parks Wainright drove on, “Wah Lung has never at any time—until yesterday morning, that is—known or felt that Penworth’s safe might hold anything incriminating whatsoever. Wah Lung even implicitly believed that Wah Lee’s X-ray films, which he had once mailed to Penworth at Penworth’s own request, were burned up in that package-box fire he described tonight. Instead of—as now, at last, we know—escaping the fire by being taken up from that box on the collection last made before the lighted newspaper got dropped into it. And, next day, safely reaching Penworth. For, of course, Elsa—as you might even
have suspected tonight from Penworth’s judicial insistence in court that the name of a certain ‘good friend’ of Wah Lung’s need not be mentioned by Wah in court because said ‘good friend’ was, in the matter in which he figured, purely a ‘negative witness’—and as you definitely did learn from Harry Seeong’s report later in the very doorway—Penworth was that ‘good friend’ to whom Wah Lung sent those X-ray films years ago, absolutely unknowing of their tremendous value as auxiliary evidence in case his son’s body were ever found. He had, you see, jumped at the chance which their sending thus would give him to pick them up at Penworth’s home, later—open them out—discuss them—and watch Penworth’s face. But was too naïve to discern, even later, that Penworth was taking advantage of that fortuitous package-box fire to withdraw them ‘from circulation.’ You and I, I’m sure, know now that had it not been for that package-box Fire, Penworth would himself have pretended to mail those X-rays back to Wah Lung—only to have them thus beautifully ‘lost in the mails’! And, as in the other case, perfectly ‘out of circulation’ for all time to come.”
Wainright paused a half second.
“No, Elsa,” he went on, “it wasn’t until yesterday—with the stealing, during the night, of Wah Lee’s recovered skull—that Wah Lung knew that Penworth’s safe would—if Penworth were the ‘fingerman’—finally have in it something that would incriminate Penworth. And, moreover, rivet him lock, stock, and barrel to a crime. And so you see, Elsa—getting back, again, to your and my point: the matter of the possible contempt sentences that might have been meted out in this affair, our gamble—that is, Wah’s, Harry Seeong’s, and mine—wasn’t much of a gamble after all. It was just about a sure thing! And with no risks. And so if Elsa Colby, in officially ‘clearing’ this poor bedtimetale scribe, has saved her fortune—well, she herself has done it—and my hearty congrats to her for the doing of it.”
But the girl shook her head firmly.
“No, John. You are quite wrong. And I’ll tell you why it was you who saved my fortune, and not I.” She paused. “There was hardly anyone, I think, in the entire courtroom tonight but that believed you were guilty after Penworth’s remarkable analysis of that long, long story you told on the witness stand. Though I personally absolutely believed you were guilty—and how!—even by the time you’d only finished your story. And not at all, John because the story was too—too rickety—or anything like that; but because it was too perfect a—a—a piece of—dramatic webwork. It—it just hung together too ingeniously to have any real verity; it—”
“Hoo-ray!” he said, but with bitterness absolutely dripping from his voice. “Then it seems I can construct fiction—fiction being something that does hang together—about other things than Little White Rabbitses—and Big Black Wolfses—and Little Brown Mices—and—oh God!” he broke off disgustedly. “Every time I even think of myself, I think of myself only as a box of fictional animal crackers; and every time I visualize myself, I see myself only as a huge radio transmitter blaring into the sweet, sticky upturned—and yawning!—faces of a million brats. Where were we—for Lord’s sake? Oh, yes! Well—you believed tonight I was guilty? And you were, I think—particularly after Penworth himself had absolutely certified my story as one hundred per cent false, by all the laws of algebra and geometry—going to try to prove to me to be a pathological liar. Well, in the face now, Elsa, of our absolute knowledge that Penworth was the ‘fingerman’ in the old Wah Lee kidnapping, I think you had a swell chance to have won your plea—for I can’t quite believe that Penworth had the guts to ship an innocent guy to the chair.”
“Don’t you? Well, I think when it was a question of him sitting there—or somebody else—there’d be no choice. For as long, John, as the convict Gus McGurk stood under the shadow of that chair, Penworth stood there too. And—still you don’t see just why a verdict of ‘guilty’ in this case was all set—even before you mounted the witness stand? And which verdict incidentally would have knocked my ownership of Colby’s Nugget into a cocked hat?”
“No, I don’t. For why wouldn’t Penworth just have grabbed at the chance to remand me for an insanity hearing? In other words, to pass the old buck?”
“Why? I’ll tell you exactly why! He wanted that skull that was found on you to become legally the skull that was dug up by the Negro laborer, Moses Klump, and put, unexamined, into Lou Vann’s safe. Which—in the face of Klump’s being now dead—and Mann’s office girl not having unwrapped and examined it—it could become only by a ‘guilty’ verdict delivered against you. Yes, John, Illinois Supreme Court decision today—in the so-called ‘Peripatetic Evidence’ Case—also called the ‘Filched Attested Evidence’ Case—centering in Ottawa, Illinois. And absolutely identical, that case—in legal structure, that is—with this case. And thus, the skull found on you being legally certified as the Klump-found skull by the simple ‘guilty’ verdict against you—Vann would indict Gus McGurk on it—and later try McGurk for kidnapping and murder, instead of for the mere extortion that McGurk’s serving. But word would have been secretly sent to McGurk by Penworth that McGurk was ‘sitting pretty’—that the skull on which he had been indicted and was going to get tried was the wrong one! And that contradictory evidence would be sprung at his murder trial to knock it sky high. And that evidence, John, would have been those X-ray films! Those beautiful ‘standard record’ X-ray films! Which would have found their way, via the underworld, or anonymously, to Fleming Wiles, McGurk’s attorney. And McGurk would have had to be cleared. Since the films, you see, would destroy the ‘fact’ of corpus delicti by no less than a United States Supreme Court decision—superior to all the State Supreme Court decisions in the world as to ‘peripatetic evidence’ and ‘filched attested evidence.’ But thus, having sat in jeopardy for the kidnapping and the murder, McGurk could never sit there again. And the eternal hazard—McGurk’s possible squawking—ever hanging over Penworth’s head, would be removed for all time to come. And all that, John, is why Penworth was hell-set to find you guilty.”
“We-ell—I guess I do see now—yes. And when you sprang a brand-new criminological test tonight which was so valid that Vann himself, before trying to go to trial on that skull, would be trying the test out—and on account of it refusing to go ahead with either indicting or prosecuting McGurk—Penworth knew that the jig was up so far as my skull ever being used to prosecute McGurk went on. And so changed horses—quick—and at once. And so one Elsa Colby cleared me tonight by just being one step ahead of everybody else criminologically!”
“No, John! Again I have to tell you that you cleared yourself—you won the acquittal verdict—and thereby a hundred thousand dollars for me.”
“But,” Parks Wainright demurred, “I just don’t see how—”
“All right! I’ll tell you. You cleared yourself simply because you told me in there tonight that you loved me. And I’m not referring, at all, to the time you told me, before you knew I owned Colby’s Nugget. But after! And after, moreover, I’d said I had some evidence that, if you were guilty, would absolutely send you to the chair—and, if you were innocent, would clear you. And would, likewise, either rob me of everything I had in the world—or save my fortune. Of course I now realiz—er—that is—we both realize now that your telling me you loved me was a—a sort of maneuver on your part to make me step on the old gas in your defense. To—to give it all I had! And—and looking back on it later as—as I rigged up my lamp—I admired you for the the keen bridge player you obviously were. But the point is, John, that—maneuver or no maneuver—you’re just not the kind of a man who would tell a girl he loved her, knowing full well—er—that is, believing—that because of that very assurance she’d go ahead full steam, risking her own esta—well, what I mean to convey, John, is that when you said you loved me, I was emboldened to put our case squarely to that deciding test—that I knew absolutely you wouldn’t sink me—and my fortunes—if you were already sunk anyway yourself. Maybe I don’t make
it quite clear—since I’m—I’m talking from the viewpoint of things as they—they seemed then; but anyway that’s—that’s just the way it was. It was your assurance that you loved me—and my knowing that you just weren’t the type who could be skunk enough to use such an assurance only to let a gal sink herself—that made me spring that ace-in-the-hole: that ultra-violet test. And I’m really grateful to you. And if, John, a promissory note, signed ‘Elsa Colby,’ and collectible in four years when Colby’s Nugget materializes into her lap, is worth the having, then here’s one place where ye attorney is darned happy to pay ye client; so just name yer figger, and—”
But at this juncture the two were interrupted by Wah Lung and the portly man with the high-ridged beak-like nose who had come to the trial with him. Both of whom had emerged from that room of death where many persons still lingered, and both of whom were obviously now on their way out. “Parks, my boy,” Wah Lung said, intense weariness in his tones, “I am going on home now. For I have been through much tonight. Physically—and emotionally. But before I leave, I want to introduce to you my guest, who has watched this trial tonight with great interest. This gentleman, let me say, flew here yesterday afternoon from a city five hundred miles or so distant—after he received a wire from me around three o’clock in the afternoon, saying that something of tremendous importance to the field of radio was to ensue here that night—if not of greater importance to himself. He is—” and he bowed “—Mr. Sanford Adlai.”
“Adlai!” The word escaped Parks Wainright in a gasp.
“Good God! Mr. Adlai of Adlai, Collerman and—”
“Yes, my boy,” said the beak-nosed man. “Of Adlai and Grimshawster only now—since Sam Collerman is no longer with the firm. And I want to tell you that, when I sat in there tonight, as Mr. Wah’s guest, and heard you tell that remarkable story, with threads in gangland—policedom—London—Minneapolis—San Francisco—with characters that flowed and swung like—like puppets on strings, I said to myself: If that man is a pathological liar—or any other kind of a liar—and escapes conviction by the grace of God—or by the wits of that girl—I am going to hire him to write continuity for the firm. And then—good God!—” He made a helpless gesture with his two pudgy hands, one still holding his velour hat. “—What do I find out, at the end, but that you—you are our own ‘P. Wainright!’ Whom we have been holding down to writing bedtime tales! I wish you to report next Monday—no, not at the New York offices, but at my Pittsburgh plant. Where I’ll turn back to you that old contract of yours—in exchange for a new one—with your name on it. A contract at $350 a week—if, that is, that will be acceptable to you! And for—let us say?—two years at least; longer—if by any chance you’ll sign for longer. For I want you to write the G-man continuity for this new electric razor—the Morning Glider—which I’m about to launch. You’ve—you’ve got just what I want! Melodrama!—contrasting characters!—plot!—dramatic dialogue! My God!—those nincompoops there at the New York office!—holding you down to writing bedtime ta—but I guess I’m as bad as they. Blind and pigheaded—even to my own interests. It took Mr. Wah here to show me how I—but report next Monday sure. Now I’ve promised to sip a pot of tea with Mr. Wah here—and so I’ll be leaving with him.”
The Case of the Lavender Gripsack Page 21
