The Case of the Backward Mule

by Erle Stanley Gardner

  “I’ll talk with the husband,” Clane said. “He may know. What cabin’s he in?”

  “Just a minute,” the woman said. “Let’s have an understanding. I don’t want any rough stuff.”

  “There won’t be.”

  “Sometimes a married woman runs away from a husband she don’t like.”

  “That’s her privilege.”

  “And the husband lots of times thinks he should follow her up and get nasty.”

  “I wouldn’t feel that way. If a woman didn’t want me, I certainly wouldn’t want her. What cabin did this couple take?”

  “You a friend of the man or the woman?”

  “I’ve never seen either one of them in my life.”

  “You ain’t a paid detective?”

  Clane, meeting the hesitancy in her eyes, was conscious of a red light.

  He turned to look over her shoulder. A high-powered sedan of the type driven by county sheriffs was slowing down at the entrance of the driveway.

  “Quick,” Clane said. “Where’s your register, what’s the cabin?”

  “I don’t know …”

  Clane pointed towards the red spotlight. “You fool,” he said, “do you want your place advertised as a gangster hide-out?”

  She gave the car a quick look. “Number three,” she said.

  Clane sprinted for the cabin she had indicated, noticing as he did so that the big sedan had stopped, blocking the driveway, apparently waiting for other cars which were behind to catch up before turning into the court.

  The door of the cabin was locked from the inside.

  “Who is it?” a man”s voice called.

  Clane said gruffly “This is your landlord. There’s a long-distance call from San Francisco for you. A woman wants to talk to the occupant of cabin three. She won’t give her name. Think you can take it?”

  “Sure.”

  There were quick steps on the thin carpet behind the door, then the door opened.

  Clane, lowering his shoulder, charged against the door.

  The occupant of the cabin was not caught entirely by surprise. He spun back, somewhat off balance for a moment, but quickly caught himself, and Clane found he was looking into a round black hole at the business end of a 38-calibre revolver. Behind the weapon were eyes that were hard with desperation and a species of insane defiance. The man circled, keeping behind the gun, kicked the door shut.

  “You’re Edward Harold,” Clane said. “I’m Terry Clane, you may have heard of me?”

  “So you’re back.”

  “I’m back.”

  “How did you trace me here?”

  “The same way that the police did,” Clane said, “only I had to leave a back trail.”

  “What do you mean, the police did?”

  “Just what I say. Take a look out through that curtain and you’ll find the sheriff’s car blocking the road out. he’s probably waiting for a motor-car driven by Inspector Malloy of the San Francisco Homicide Squad to make a rendezvous with him.”

  “I see. You want me to look out the window so you can jump me.”

  Clane said “What I want you to do is to walk out and give yourself up.”

  Harold’s laugh was derisive.

  Clane said “I have a theory on this thing. I think I can help you, but I can’t do a thing if you don’t surrender.”

  “I know. You want me to surrender. You’d like to have me out of the way. You came back from China at a very opportune time, at a very opportune time, didn’t you? You walked out on Cynthia and now you’d like to have her back. For a while I was in the way, then you heard …”

  “Don’t be foolish,” Clane said.

  “I’m not being foolish, I’m just telling you facts. If you’re telling the truth and there’s a sheriff’s car out there, I’m not going out of here alive. I’ll fight it out right here. I’ve got the guns and the ammunition. Personally, I think you’re lying to me.”

  “I’m telling you the truth.”

  “All right, I’m going to go out feet first and you’re going out the same way. Don’t kid yourself, Clane. The minute the first shot is fired, I’m going to see that you get a dose of lead poisoning.”

  Clane said “You fool, I think you stand a chance. If…”

  There were hard pounding steps on the porch, knuckles banged on the door. “Open up,” a gruff voice said.

  Harold motioned Clane to silence as he tiptoed stealthily back towards a corner.

  “Come on, Harold,” the voice said, “the jig is up. This is the sheriff. I’m taking you into custody as an escapee.”

  Harold said nothing.

  “Come on, don’t be a fool. We’ve got the place surrounded,” a new voice said, the voice of Inspector James Malloy of San Francisco.

  “Come and get me,” Harold shouted as the door-knob rattled and the door bent under the weight of a burly shoulder. “Stay away from that door if you value your life. I’m going to start putting lead through it.”

  There was that in his voice that carried conviction. There was a sound of motion outside the door, then sudden silence.

  Seconds became minutes. Nothing from the outside disturbed the calm tranquillity of the afternoon. Inside the shabby cabin the curtains were drawn. The afternoon sunlight which turned the curtains into oblongs of gold beat against the western side of the flimsy board cabin and warmed the close air in the place until it seemed stifling.

  The cabin contained the usual cheap furniture an iron bedstead with a thin mattress, a worn carpet, a cheap dressing-table, a dark-finished pine rocking-chair, two cane-bottomed, straight-backed chairs, a cement shower with a tap which wouldn’t quite shut off.

  In the tense, hot silence of the cabin, Clane could hear the drip, drip, drip of water from the leaky shower and the lazy buzz of a big fly which circled around the room, striking against the warmth of the window blinds at intervals in an attempt to follow the source of sunlight to a means of egress.

  Clane noticed the tenseness of the skin over Harold”s knuckles, saw the sheen of small beads of perspiration across the skin of his forehead.

  Clane said evenly “If you surrender, you stand a chance. The minute you pull the trigger on that gun for the first shot, You’ve sealed your fate. That’s assault with a deadly weapon with intent to commit murder. It’s resisting an officer. They’ll throw the book at you, even if you could fight free on the other charge.”

  Harold said grimly, his eyes still on the door “Don’t kid yourself, the first shot isn’t going to be any assault with a deadly weapon with intent to commit murder. It’s going to be a dead-centre shot right in the middle of your yellow guts.”

  Clane said “Whoever engineered your escape wasn’t doing you a favour. It was putting your neck into a noose.”

  “Keep talking,” Harold said. “If you can talk your way out of this, you’ll be a world’s champion. You …”

  A slight scraping sound from the front porch caused him to jerk the gun half towards the door.

  Abruptly and without warning the glass of the window crashed explosively. The window blind billowed inward from the force of a solid body which had been hurled through the glass, then snapped upward as the impact released the catch which was holding the blind down.

  A tear-gas bomb from which the plug had been pulled rolled free of the broken glass from the nozzle came a hissing sound as the gas spewed out into the room.

  “Don’t reach for it,” Clane yelled as Harold started forward. “They’ll be waiting to machine-gun you.”

  The first whiff of the tear gas stung Clane’s nostrils. He saw Harold brace himself for a leap to grab the tear-gas bomb and throw it back out through the window.

  At that moment Clane went forward in a football tackle.

  He felt his shoulders smash against Harold’s body, heard the rattle of a sub-machine-gun, then a voice yelling “Hold everything.”

  Clane’s eyes and nostrils caught a full undiluted whiff of the tear gas and he went blind, t
he tears streaming down his face but his hands were busy getting a wrestler’s lock on Harold’s arms.

  They were threshing blindly about the floor, Clane holding on with dogged persistence, trying to get a scissors hold on Harold’s legs, Harold kicking and pummelling with his knees, trying to break free.

  Clane could hear the sound of Harold’s laboured breathing, felt the cold perspiration of Harold’s skin against his cheek, heard the hissing of the tear gas and then suddenly Harold’s arms were jerked back. The struggling ceased.

  From the vague realm of space above him, which he could not see because of his blinded eyes, Clane heard Inspector Jim Malloy’s voice saying in shocked surprise “Well, I’ll be damned! It’s Terry Clane!”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CLANE FELT THE BITE OF HANDCUFFS on his wrists. He was guided to a chair out in the open air away from the sting of the tear gas.

  Jim Malloy did the talking. “You certainly do get around, Mr Clane. You certainly do get around.”

  “I was trying to get Edward Harold to surrender to the police.”

  “And we got here just in time to upset your plans.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Now ain’t that too bad?” Malloy said sympathetically. “That’s just a lousy, rotten break, because the way It’s going to look to the D.A. is that you had been hiding Harold all along. First you get down to the warehouse where he’s hiding, and then blessed if you don’t take right off in a motor-car and pick him up in the auto camp where he’s hiding. I suppose you’d call it sort of an intuition. Maybe you’re like a bird dog and can just locate him by scent.”

  Clane said “I located him the same way you did.”

  “And how did we locate him?”

  “I suppose by using your head.”

  “Well, now, isn’t that interesting? Do you mean a man could just sit down and think and find out what particular auto court this man happened to be hidden in?”

  “Don’t be foolish,” Clane said wearily. “I decided an auto court was the only place for him to go, an auto court that was pretty well outside of the city. If you’ll check back you’ll find that I’ve been stopping all the way between San Jose and here asking at everyone of the less pretentious auto courts.”

  “Well now, if you have,” Malloy said, “that might be … No, I guess it wouldn’t either. The D.A. would laugh at me. He’d say “Don’t be silly, Jim, That’s an easy way to make an alibi. It’s something the guy did himself, and it didn’t take him over half an hour or an hour at the outside to do. If word got around that we were pushovers for stuff like that, why, everybody would be doing it.”

  “Have it your own way,” Clane said.

  “You’re something of a mystery to me,” Malloy went on. “I mean you really are, Clane. I just can’t figure it out. Now here you are, back from China, sitting on top of the world, and you start right in mixing in with this thing, which is after all really none of your business. Now take that Chinese scrub-woman you have, for instance. You know, you almost had me fooled there. I thought I’d better give her a lift down to Chinatown and talk to her a little bit, and then she fooled me. I was all ready to let her go, but I thought I’d better take a look in that laundry package. And what do you think I found in there?”

  Clane said nothing.

  “A woman’s plaid coat and a hat, an expensive pair of shoes that fit the Chinese girl’s feet like a glove, a pair of real genuine nylon stockings and an expensive silk blouse. Now I leave it to you, Clane, if that ain’t a mighty funny package of laundry for a woman to be taking away from a man’s apartment. Now, the funny thing about that coat is that it seems to be Cynthia Renton’s coat. There’s a tailor’s label on the inside and the tailor says it’s a coat he made for Cynthia Renton.”

  “And what does the Chinese girl say?”

  “Well, the Chinese girl doesn’t say anything much. She sort of intimates that the clothes are cast-off things that had been given to her by some Chinese charitable outfit, but she was carrying a purse with over 500 dollars in it and a driving licence in the name of Sou Ha, and she can’t tell us the name of the charitable agency that gave her the clothes. And then I got to thinking around about that case we had years ago, and darned if there wasn’t a Chinese girl mixed up in that case. I think her name was Sou Ha. You know how it is with these Chinese, Mr Clane, It’s hard to remember their faces, particularly the women. One looks exactly like another.”

  “And so you arrested her?” Clane asked.

  “Well, we didn’t exactly arrest her. We’re holding her for questioning. She’s what you might call the guest of the city, if you know what I mean.”

  “I guess I know what you mean.”

  “Perhaps you can explain how it happens that she had Cynthia Renton’s coat?”

  “I don’t feel much like making explanations right now.”

  “Well, now, that’s too bad. And you were the one who could concentrate so readily, too. You could concentrate regardless of distractions and all that stuff.”

  Clane said nothing.

  “I was hoping perhaps you could concentrate on some of this stuff. After all, Clane, I hate to take you along and charge you with being an accessory after the fact. Now suppose you tell us just how you knew Harold was at this place.”

  “If you’ve been sleuthing around, locating him here, you certainly must have crossed by back trail.”

  There was a moment’s silence, and Clane would have given much if he could have seen the expression on Malloy’s face. But after a moment Malloy said, almost too casually “Suppose you tell us how you went about it, Clane.”

  Clane told him of the survey of the places from which Harold could have placed a call, the trail he had uncovered, the patient work in running it down.

  Malloy listened without interruption. How much of it was news to him, Clane had no means of knowing.

  When Clane had finished, Malloy said “I’ve been looking into the whereabouts of the two Taonons. Around eight-thirty this morning Mrs Taonon rang up police headquarters to see if there had been any news of her husband—said he hadn’t been home all night, and she was afraid there might have been a traffic accident or something. She said he got a phone call around ten o’clock and rushed out as though he was in quite a hurry. He told her he’d be back in thirty minutes—but he never came back. And now it seems that she’s disappeared, too. The man that went to their apartment reports that she isn’t there.”

  “Now then,” Malloy went on, “I saw you in that grocery store up near Hendrum’s place. I suppose you were making inquiries trying to find out where those groceries came from. Now that’s police routine. An amateur just can’t do that sort of stuff. In the first place, you don’t have any standing. You make the grocers suspicious and you’re talking about a good customer of theirs.”

  “You can see what’s bound to happen. You go into a store and start asking questions about whether Bill Hendrum, let us say, bought an order of groceries in the last few days consisting of about forty or fifty dollars worth of canned goods and stuff. The manager of the store won’t tell you whether he did or didn’t. Then, before You’re out of the store good, the proprietor rings up Bill Hendrum, if Hendrum happens to be a customer of his, and tells him all about the conversation.”

  Clane looked properly contrite.

  “So you see,” Malloy went on, “That’s where you amateurs mess things up. Now the police move in, take over the inquiry and have some official status. They can warn the grocer not to say anything and then start questioning him. In that way, that don’t alarm the suspect.”

  “Yes, I see your point, now that you make it,” Clane said apologetically.

  “So you see,” Malloy went on, “by ten o’clock this morning, we knew where those groceries came from—something you wouldn’t have been able to find out in a week, even if you’d done nothing but leg work.”

  “Where did they come from?” Clane asked.

  “Well, now,” Malloy said
, “I don’t know as there’s any harm in telling you, the way things are right now. They were purchased by Mrs Ricardo Taonon.”

  Clane was silent, thinking that over.

  “And,” Inspector Malloy went on musingly, “Taonon was a pretty good husband in some ways.”

  “You say ‘was’,” Clane observed.

  “Well, now, I did, didn’t I?” Malloy said. “That’s funny -just some sort of a subconscious trick, I guess.”

  “You mean he’s dead?”

  “He’s disappeared, was the way I expressed it.”

  “That was the way you expressed it, and then you started referring to him in the past tense.”

  “Well, I don’t know why I did that,” Malloy said. “What I started out to say was that he was a good husband. He has a lot of businesses that are more or less tangled up, but I understand he’s fixed things so that in case anything happens to him his wife won’t have any trouble raising money to meet taxes and all that stuff. He carries quite a slug of insurance.”

  “And you think something’s happened to him?”

  “Well, now, I wouldn’t want you to quote me as saying he’d been killed.”

  “But you think he has?”

  “I’m not thinking. I’m asking questions. You don’t know anything about him, do you?”

  “In what way?”

  “Oh, about his not being—shall we say available?”

  “No. I wish you’d tell me what you found out about him. How did he die?”

  “I didn’t say he was dead.”

  “You intimated it.”

  “I’m just commenting about what we found out,” Malloy said. “You see, we’re trying to find out about that call that sent Taonon rushing out last night. So we asked his partner in this Oriental company—chap by the name of Stacey Nevis. You know him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, Nevis hadn’t called him, but he thought Gloster had.”

  “Indeed?”

  “That’s right. Nevis had a call himself from Gloster. You see, Stacey Nevis was out with some friends playing cards—a sociable little poker game—and Nevis was winning. So naturally the boys didn’t want him to leave and take the winnings with him—just human nature.”