The Case of the Curious Bride пм-4

by Эрл Стенли Гарднер

  "Yeah, I read about it," Otis said. "They got some woman for it, didn't they? The wife of a wealthy guy from Chicago."

  Mason nodded. There was a moment of silence and then the lawyer went on in a low voice, "Of course, Otis, your family wouldn't need to know that a murder had been committed there. They might recognize the place, or some of the neighbors might tell them, but by that time they'd be moved in. It's a very comfortable little apartment. It would be a nice place for the folks. It's on the south side of the house and catches the sunshine."

  "Gee, that'd be swell," Otis said, "but why do that for me, Counselor?"

  "Because," Perry Mason said, "I want you to do something for me."

  "What is it?"

  "When you move into the apartment," Perry Mason said impressively, "and I'd like to have you move in today, I want you to take off the doorbell that's in the apartment and put on one of your own."

  The electrician frowned and said, "Take off the doorbell?"

  "It may be a bell, or it may be a buzzer," Mason said. "Whichever one it is, I want you to take it off and put on another one. The doorbell that you put on must be one that you've taken from stock. I want it to have your price mark on it, and I want you to have at least two witnesses who see you take off the one that's there now and put the new one on. Those two witnesses can be two members of your family if you want, but I want to be certain they see you do it, and I don't want any one to know why you're doing it. You can make some objection to the bell or buzzer that's there now. Say that you don't like the sound of it, or something of that sort."

  "You don't want me to put on a buzzer?" asked Otis, puzzled. "If there's a buzzer on there now, do you want me to put on a buzzer?"

  "No. Put on a doorbell, and put on one that you've taken from stock. Be sure it's a bell and not a buzzer."

  The electrician nodded.

  "One more thing," — Mason said, "the bell or buzzer that's on there now must be kept, and when you take it off, you can put some mark of identification on it so you'll know it if you see it again. For instance, you can let your screwdriver slip and make a long scratch across the enamel, something that will look like an accident, and yet will furnish means of identification. Do you understand?"

  Otis nodded. "I think I do," he said. "Tell me, is it on the up and up?"

  "Absolutely. I've paid the rent to the landlord for six months in advance. If any one should ask you how you happened to rent that apartment, you can say that you wanted an apartment where you could put your family, a place where there was some sunlight; that you didn't want to pay a high rental; that as soon as you saw in the paper that a murder had been committed in this apartment, you knew that it could be rented cheap.

  "Here's the key to the apartment and here's fifty dollars which will cover the expenses of moving in. It's furnished, but there's room for anything you've got."

  The big electrician made a brushing motion with his hand, pushing back the folded fifty dollar bill.

  Mason insisted. "It's a matter of business all around, Otis," he said. "You're doing me a favor and it gives me a chance to do you a favor."

  Otis was undecided for a moment; suddenly his forehead puckered to a frown. "Wasn't there something in that case," he said, "about people next door hearing a doorbell ring when the murder was being committed?"

  Perry Mason stared steadily at him. "Yes," he said.

  Otis grinned, reached out and took the fifty dollars. "Thanks, Counselor," he said, "we'll move in today."

  Chapter 13

  Paul Drake was seated in Perry Mason's outer office chatting with Della Street when Mason pushed open the door, removed his hat and grinned greeting. The detective elevated a bony forefinger toward the morning paper which was folded under the lawyer's arm. "Have you read it?" he asked.

  Mason shook his head. "I usually buy it from the boy at the corner," he said, "and read it before I start the daily grind. Why? Is there anything important in it?"

  The detective nodded lugubriously. Della Street 's face was serious. Perry Mason looked from one to the other.

  "Go ahead," he said, "spill it."

  "The district attorney," Drake said, "has evidently got a regular professional publicity man on the job."

  "Why?"

  "Because every morning he keeps releasing something dramatic against your client."

  Mason said tonelessly, "He'll run out of facts one of these mornings. What is it this time?"

  "He's going to exhume the body of the man who was buried under the name Gregory Lorton. He intimated he expects to find poison. He keeps harping back to the fact that Rhoda Montaine was a nurse; that she put Ipral in her husband's chocolate when she wanted him to sleep soundly; that if she wanted him to sleep just a little more soundly, it would have been an easy matter for her to have put in a deadly poison."

  The lines of Mason's face became harsh. "They're afraid they won't be able to use the testimony of the husband in court, so they're spreading this Ipral business all over the newspapers.

  "There's no question they're using a deliberate campaign of adverse newspaper publicity. They're trying to slap me in the face with the front page of a newspaper every morning."

  "Anything you can do about it?" asked Paul Drake.

  Mason narrowed his lips and said, "A lot I can do about it. If he wants to give that girl a fair trial, that's one thing. If he wants to try the case in the newspapers and try to prejudice the public against her, that's another thing."

  "Watch your step, chief," Della Street warned; "the district attorney may be trying to get you to do something desperate."

  Perry Mason's slow grin held grim portent. "I've fought the devil with fire before this, and haven't had my fingers burnt."

  "You've had your hair singed a couple of times," Drake pointed out. "When you start pulling fast ones, you can take more chances than any one I ever knew."

  A twinkle came to the lawyer's eyes. "Well," he said, "I'll promise you both something."

  "What is it?"

  "You haven't seen anything yet."

  "You mean you're going to pull a fast one in this case?" Della Street asked, her eyes dark with concern.

  "So fast," Mason said, "that it's going to whiz over the home plate before any one knows whether it's a strike or a ball."

  "What good's it going to do if the umpire can't call it?" Drake inquired, the droll humor of his face more emphasized than ever.

  "Perhaps," said Perry Mason softly, "it's not anything that I want called by the umpire. I may be aiming at the man who's doing the batting… Come on in, Paul."

  The two men seated themselves in Mason's private office. Drake pulled a notebook from his pocket.

  "Got something, Paul?"

  "I think so."

  "What is it?"

  "You told me to check back on Moxley and find out everything he'd been doing, as nearly as I could."

  "Yes."

  "It wasn't easy. Moxley did time. He got out of jail broke. He needed money pretty badly. He was a lone wolf, so it's pretty hard to tell all that he did, but I've got a line on something that he did, that is, I think he did it."

  "Go ahead," the lawyer said.

  "We found out Moxley put through a long distance call to Centerville. We also discovered his trunk had a label from the Palace Hotel in Centerville. We checked the records of the Palace Hotel and couldn't find where Moxley had ever been registered there. However, there's one peculiar thing about his record. He'd keep changing his last name, but he'd nearly always keep his first name as Gregory. He probably did that so when people called him by his first name, he didn't have to watch his step to remember an alias. Anyhow, we went back over the records of the Palace Hotel, and found that a Gregory Freeman had been registered there for something over two months. So we took a look through the marriage licenses and found out that a man named Gregory Freeman had married a girl by the name of Doris Pender.

  "We looked up the Pender woman and found that she'd been employed as a s
tenographer and bookkeeper in a creamery, there at Centerville. She was a steady, industrious worker and had saved up a little money that she'd put in stocks and bonds. Then she got married, gave up her job and moved away with her husband. Apparently, she didn't have any relatives there in Centerville, although the people at the creamery thought she had a brother some place in the northern part of the state."

  Mason's eyes glittered with concentration. He nodded his head thoughtfully. "Good work, Paul," he said.

  "So," the detective went on, "we checked through the meter connections of the electric light company, just on a chance that Gregory Moxley and this Pender woman might have lived here under the name of Gregory Freeman. We didn't find any connections under that name, but we did find a meter connection about two weeks ago under the name of Doris Freeman at the Balboa Apartments, at seven twentyone West Ordway. She's got apartment 609. She's living there by herself. No one seems to know a thing about her."

  "Perhaps," said the lawyer, "we can trace some telephone calls through the apartment switchboard, and…"

  The detective grinned. "Listen," he said, "what do you think us guys do to earn our money?"

  "Oh," Mason said pointedly, "do you earn it?"

  "Wait until I finish and you'll say we do," Drake said. "I haven't told you anything yet."

  "Go ahead then and tell me something."

  "We found there was a switchboard in the lobby. There's some one on duty in the lobby all the time. The switchboard isn't particularly busy. They keep a record of calls that are made and the number of the apartment from which the calls come.

  "We were afraid to try and pump the person who had the records, so we arranged to decoy him away from the desk for a few minutes, and one of my operatives slipped in and took a look in the book that lists the telephone records.

  "These records aren't kept on an hourly basis—just by the date on which the calls are put through—but we found that this apartment was charged with a call to South ninefourthreesixtwo on the sixteenth day of June, and that call was the first call in the book under date of June 16th, so it must have been made shortly after midnight."

  "Where's the book?" asked the lawyer.

  "Out there. But we got a photograph of the page that shows the call. That will keep them from doctoring the book, in case we want to bring it into court."

  Mason nodded thoughtfully. "Good work," he said. "We may want to bring that book into court—and then, again, we may not. Have you got a good man that we can put on the job? One who's dependable, Paul?"

  "Sure. I've got Danny Spear. He's the one who took the photograph."

  "Is he good?"

  "I'll say he is, one of the best in the business. You should remember him, Perry. We used him in that hatchet murder case."

  Mason nodded. "Let's get him," he said, "and go on out there."

  "To the Balboa Apartments?"

  "Yes."

  Drake picked up his hat. "Let's go," he said.

  Chapter 14

  Paul Drake slowed his light car and swung in close to the curb. Danny Spear, a nondescript individual, with a flatcrowned brown hat tilted back to show rusty brown locks straggling out from under the sweat band, glanced inquiringly at Perry Mason.

  Spear would never have been taken for a detective. There was something wideeyed and innocent about him that made him appear to be a typical «rube» pausing in front of a shell game at a country fair. His face habitually wore the pleased grin of a yokel who is seeing the world for the first time. "What do I do?" he asked.

  "You trail us into the apartment house," Mason told him. "We'll go in the jane's apartment and buzz the door. If she opens the door to let us in, you walk on past as though you were going to some apartment down at the end of the corridor. But you time things so that you get a look at her face as you walk past the door. It'll only be a quick glimpse, but you can get a flash of her face so you can spot her later on. Now, it's important that you get her fixed in your mind. If you don't get enough of a look to recognize her, you'd better wait until we get in and then come and knock at the door and put up some kind of a stall about knowing the jane that used to live in the apartment, or something of that sort. If you do get a good look at her, take a divorce from us and tail her if she goes out. We'll leave you with the car. When Drake and I leave the place, we'll call a cab. You can be sitting in the car. Do you get that straight?"

  Danny Spear nodded. "I gotcha," he said.

  "The probabilities are she'll watch us when we leave," Mason said. "She'll be worried, because that's what we're going there for. We're going to worry her. I don't know whether she pulled this stuff alone, or whether she didn't but that's one of the things I want to find out."

  "Suppose she telephones?" asked Spear.

  Mason said slowly. "She won't telephone. We're going to make her think her line has been tapped."

  "You're just going to make her suspicious, is that right?"

  "Yes."

  "She'll be looking for a shadow," Danny Spear protested.

  "That's something we can't help. That's where you've got to play it carefully, and that's why I want you to get a divorce from us as soon as we leave the place. She'll see you walking past us in the corridor and won't figure that you're with us at all."

  "Okay," Danny Spear said. "You birds had better drive around the block and let me off at the corner. I'll walk up behind you and time things so we go in the apartment house together. There's just a chance some of her friends might be watching out of a window. If they saw the three of us get out of the same car, it might not be so hot."

  Drake nodded, shifted the car into gear, ran around the block, dropped Danny at the corner, swung once more into a parking place in front of the apartment house, got out leisurely, and pulled down his vest, gave his coat collar a jerk and adjusted his tie. With wellsimulated carelessness, the two men entered the apartment house, walking slowly. Behind them came Danny Spear, walking rapidly.

  A fat man was seated in a rocking chair in the lobby. He was the only occupant.

  Still walking slowly toward the elevator, Paul Drake and the lawyer swung slightly to one side as Danny Spear bustled past them. To the fat man in the chair it seemed purely a fortuitous combination of circumstances which placed all three men in the elevator at the same time.

  In the upper corridor, Danny Spear held back, while the other two found the door of the apartment they wanted and tapped on the panels. There was the sound of motion, the click of a lock. The door opened, and a rather plain woman of about twentyfive years of age, with large brown eyes and thin, firm lips, stared in mute interrogation.

  "Are you," asked Perry Mason in rather a loud voice, "Doris Freeman?"

  "Yes," she said. "What do you want?"

  Perry Mason turned slightly to one side, so that Danny Spear, walking rapidly down the corridor, could see the young woman's face.

  "My business," said Perry Mason, "can hardly be stated in the corridor."

  "Book agent?"

  "No."

  "Life insurance?"

  "No."

  "Selling anything?"

  "No."

  "What do you want?"

  "To ask you a few questions."

  The thin lips clamped more firmly together. The eyes widened. There was a flicker of fear in their depths. "Who are you?"

  "We're collecting some data for the Bureau of Vital Statistics."

  "I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about."

  By this time, Danny Spear had gone well past them toward the end of the corridor, where he was pounding on a door with imperative knuckles. The door swung open, and a man's voice gruffed a greeting and the operative said, "I've got an express package down stairs for C. Finley Dodge. Where do you want it delivered?…"

  Perry Mason boldly pushed his way past the woman, into the apartment. Drake followed and kicked the door shut. She remained standing, clad in a print housedress, and, as the light from the windows struck her face, it brought out incipient caliper
lines which were stretching from her nostrils toward the ends of her thin lips. There was no makeup on her face, and her shoulders were slightly rounded. There could be no mistaking the fear in her eyes as her glance shifted from Mason to Drake, then back to Mason again. "What is it?" she asked.

  The lawyer, who had been sizing her up carefully, nodded imperceptibly to Paul Drake. "It's important," he said, in a harsh, aggressive voice, "that you answer all of our questions truthfully. If you start lying to us, you're going to get into trouble, do you understand that?"

  "What do you mean?" she countered.

  "Are you married or single?" asked Perry Mason.

  "I don't know what business it is of yours."

  Mason raised his voice, "Never mind that, sister. You just answer my questions and keep your comments until later. Are you married or single?"

  "I'm married."

  "Where did you live before you came here?"

  "I'm not going to tell you."

  Mason looked over at Paul Drake and said significantly, "That is the best proof of guilt we can have."

  As Doris Freeman turned to stare apprehensively at Paul Drake, Perry Mason lowered his right eyelid in a significant wink. "That isn't a sign of guilt, in itself," said Paul Drake, pursing his lips thoughtfully.

  Mason whirled toward the young woman. Once more, his voice became the voice of a lawyer browbeating a witness. "You lived in Centerville, didn't you? Don't deny it. You might as well admit it now as later."

  "Is it," she asked, "a crime to live in Centerville?"

  Mason turned back to Drake. His lips twisted in a sneer. "How much more do you want?" he asked. "If she isn't in on it she wouldn't stall like that."

  Doris Freeman's hands crept to her throat. She walked unsteadily toward an overstuffed chair, sat down suddenly, as though her knees had lost their strength. "What," she said, "what…"

  "Your husband's name," said Perry Mason.

  "Freeman."

  "What's his first name?"

  "Sam."