The Case of the Backward Mule

by Erle Stanley Gardner

  “Go on,” Clane said, fighting to keep the eagerness out of his voice.

  “Well, now,” Malloy said, “That’s just about all there was to it. Nevis got to winning early in the evening, and it seems he began to get telephone calls wanting him to go places, and naturally the boys didn’t want him to go. He had a call from Gloster, who seemed very much excited—said that he’d gone down to the warehouse for something or other, and found that someone was living in the warehouse, and he wanted Nevis to come down there right away. Said he had already called Ricardo Taonon and got him to come down. Said he’d been trying to call Nevis for half an hour. Wasn’t until Taonon gave him the number of the place where the poker game was on that Gloster knew where he could reach Nevis.”

  “And what did Nevis do?” Clane asked.

  “What could he do? The minute he started to talk about getting away, the boys got up in arms. They could hear his conversation on the telephone. He was in an adjoining room, but the door was open and they started shouting at Nevis that if he left the game before midnight, it would mean a fifty-dollar fine. Well, Nevis was in something of a quandary. First he told Gloster he’d come down there then he explained the situation to him and they talked for a minute, and then Gloster said that he’d tell Taonon to wait for him, and he’d make a quick run up to where Nevis was playing poker and talk with Nevis up there. So Nevis finally agreed to that.”

  “And Gloster came up?” Clane asked.

  “That’s right. Gloster drove up outside and honked his horn. Nevis went down and talked with him. Then Nevis went back to the game and Gloster went back to the warehouse. And that, as nearly as the time can be fixed, was about ten or fifteen minutes before Gloster telephoned to you. Gloster must have had that talk with Nevis and then driven back to the warehouse, met Ricardo Taonon, talked with you, and then got himself murdered when he was trying to put through a telephone call to somebody.”

  “And who do you claim murdered him? Who’s the official suspect now?”

  “Either you and Cynthia Renton did it,” Malloy said, “or Edward Harold came back and pulled the trigger to keep Gloster from calling the police. My associates pick Harold. Me, I’m not so sure.”

  “I suppose,” Clane said somewhat wearily, “Nevis has witnesses to all these facts you’ve given me?”

  “Witnesses?” Malloy said. “My gosh, what are you trying to get at now, Mr Clane?”

  “I was just asking a question.”

  “Well, it sounded suspicious. Like a little more of your amateur getting the cart before the horse. Witnesses, bless my soul, yes, I guess you never tried to get away from a poker game when you were a heavy winner. Has he got witnesses? He’s got a whole tableful of witnesses, six men in that poker game, and five of them out money to Stacey Nevis! Has he got witnesses?”

  “I’ll say he has.”

  “And what time did this poker game finally break up?”

  “About three o’clock in the morning.”

  “Nevis still winner?”

  Malloy chuckled. “Nevis lost his shirt. So you see, Mr Clane, why it’s a bad thing to have you running around with this amateurish enthusiasm of yours. You mess things up—although I will admit you probably saved us some shooting when we picked up Harold here. But I’m afraid I’ve got to put you out of circulation for a while.”

  Clane said “Tell me one thing, Inspector.”

  “What”s that?

  “Down in that warehouse, there were four fresh fingerprints on the desk blotter—apparently the prints of dusty fingers. Whose prints were they? Taonon’s? Harold’s?”

  “No, they were Gloster’s.”

  “Gloster’s!”

  “That’s right, the dead man’s. The prints of four fingers on the left hand, spread out so each was about an inch apart.”

  Clane said, almost musingly “As I remember it the prints of the first and second fingers were broad, that of the little finger hardly more than a dot.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Indicating that Gloster was standing at the desk—probably bent over it, his weight resting on his left hand, which was turned so that most of the weight was on the first two fingers and on the thumb.”

  “That’s right, only there was no thumb-print.”

  “It’s almost impossible to put weight on the first two fingers without touching the thumb to the same surface,” Clane said.

  “I didn’t say he didn’t touch the thumb,” Malloy said. “I said there was no thumb print. The prints were made from dust. The thumb simply didn’t have any dust on it, therefore it left no print.”

  “And why was there dust on the fingers but none on the thumb?” Clane asked.

  “Lord bless you, Mr Clane, I wouldn’t know! That’s the sort of thing we leave to you bright amateurs. And now, Mr Clane, if you’re ready, I’m afraid I’ve got to arrest you as being an accessory after the fact. It’s too bad, but I have to do it. No hard feelings, Mr Clane.”

  But Terry Clane made no answer. For the moment his face was an expressionless mask as though he were in a hypnotic trance.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE SWEETISH SMELL OF JAIL DISINFECTANT filled the air, permeated Terry Clane’s clothing, clung to his hands until it seemed a sticky, tangible something from which there was no escape. The corridors reeked with an aura of discouragement, of human oppression. Under the veneer of men’s enforced acquiescence in the will of their captors lay a vicious resentment that lurked in the corners of the jail as an intangible psychic force evaporating wherever one looked, only to form in a miasmic menace behind one’s back.

  Terry Clane and Edward Harold occupied the cell together, a cell which contained two wooden stools, an unscreened toilet, a wash-basin and two steel bunks, hinged to the wall and let down by a chain into a level position. Each had a thin straw mattress and one blanket.

  Harold said to Clane “They have no right to put you in here. They haven’t even put a charge against you yet.”

  Clane said “Right or not, I’m here.”

  “Aren’t you going to do anything about it?”

  “Perhaps.”

  Harold, seated on the stool, his elbows resting on his spread knees, his back humped in an attitude of dejection, said “I’d ten times rather be dead.”

  Clane said nothing.

  “I’d made up my mind to go out fighting. I don’t want to be cooped up like a rat watching the days trickle away until they drag me out of my cell and shove me into a gas-chamber.”

  Clane said “On the contrary, this is the best thing that’s happened to you for a long time.”

  Harold raised his eyebrows.

  “Now,” Clane said, “we’re going to go ahead with your appeal. You would have been in a stronger position if you had surrendered to the police, but even as it is you have a chance. The Supreme Court is going to look over the case pretty carefully. It won’t have the emotional instability of a jury. The only thing that convicted you was lying about going back to Farnsworth’s house that second time. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you committed a murder. It merely means that you falsified your testimony.”

  Harold”s head drooped down until his eyes were fixed in unwinking scrutiny on the floor of the cell.

  There was a long period of silence, a period which would have been awkward under any other circumstances. But in the jail there was no criterion for the passing of time. Here human being were frozen into a static existence which left them divorced from life itself. They had the semblance of free and independent agencies, but there was no place for them to go, nothing to do. Time moved on, but time ceased to have any significance because time would lead to no change. It was as though some motion-picture machine had suddenly broken down, leaving the images of men projected upon a screen. The attitude was one of action. The external manifestation of the figures was that of animation, but that appearance was only an arbitrary illusion. The figures remained stationary on the screen. The figure that was walking kept his leg
advanced, his foot upraised, but the step he was about to take never materialized.

  Already the grip of the jail had impressed itself upon these men so that the long minutes of silence seemed to call for no attempt at alleviating the conversational inactivity. There in the jail cell, silence and inaction were normal. One could resist them with spasmodic bits of conversation, with an occasional physical motion, but those were gestures of futility. In the end, the silence and the inaction were destined to dominate the scene.

  “You know,” Harold said at length, “for a while I thought… I thought you were sort of a god. Then, after I had started to worship you, I came to hate you.”

  Clane sat silent.

  Harold kept his head down, his chin on his chest. “Hell,” he said, “what’s the use? I’m finished. My race is run. I worshipped you and then I came to hate you because you were standing between Cynthia and me. You have done something to Cynthia that can never be undone. You have impressed your personality so indelibly upon her that you have made her a part of you. You can separate, you can even fight, but you can’t resist that peculiar blending. You’re welded together in some way.”

  “In other words,” Clane said, “You’re jealous. And your jealousy has distorted your perspective.”

  “Of course I’m jealous. I was jealous. I’ve nothing to be jealous of any more. A dead man can’t have a wife.”

  “You’re not dead yet.”

  “I’m legally dead.”

  “Nonsense.”

  Once more silence dominated the scene, a silence steeped in the sticky sweet smell of jail antiseptic. Night had fallen and this wing of the big jail was silent save for an occasional rumbling of noise which came from one of the tanks up near the front. A big incandescent blazed down from the ceiling. Soon it would be switched out and only a small night light would furnish dim illumination, the forces of darkness allying themselves with those of silence to finish their work of crushing the human initiative of the inmates.

  “I suppose I did make a mistake,” Harold said, “I certainly got my defence all messed up. I lied to my lawyer and that’s always bad. After all, it was really you that did it.”

  “I did?” Clane asked in surprise.

  “You remember that figure you gave Cynthia, the figure of the man on the mule?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know how much of the real philosophy of that Cynthia ever got. She’s a spontaneous creature. You don’t associate her with philosophy. She’s an opportunist, an extrovert.”

  “I know,” Clane said.

  “Lovable because she has no need for philosophy. She lives her philosophy. She’s keyed to the universe in some way. She is life. What I’m trying to say is that life manifests itself through her and life is immortal. Life is spontaneous. Life is perpetual youth. And Cynthia is a priestess of that … Oh, hell, I’m getting all balled up trying to tell you something that you can’t express in words.”

  “I know what you mean,” Clane said.

  Harold was silent again, then after a minute or two went on as though there had been no break in the conversation. “She told me something about the philosophy of that figure on the mule. You’d told her about it and she’d remembered just enough of it to make it impress itself on my mind. I kept thinking over what she’d told me, adding to it. Perhaps building up something of my own ideas in connection with it until it seemed … well, it seemed something of a philosophy of life that was completely satisfying, a soul food which contained all the vitamins. Damned if I know why I’m talking to you this way, but you’re probably the last man I will ever see who will have the ability to understand what I’m trying to say. Despite the fact that I hate your guts.”

  “You don’t need to hate me,” Clane said.

  “I do, and don’t come back with any of that sop about having no hatred for me, only pity. You’ve stepped in and succeeded where I’ve failed. I thought I had Cynthia’s love before I learned that she didn’t have any love left to give. Her heart was yours. She thought she had taken it back from you, but she hadn’t. She couldn’t.”

  Clane said “As to that, I’m quite sure you’re wrong.”

  “And I’m sure I’m right.”

  “I know Cynthia pretty well.”

  “You knew her pretty well. How much have you seen of her in the last three years?”

  “Nothing.”

  “There you are,” Harold said. “You planted a seed. It germinated and grew—just as a man could stick a seed in a flowerpot and walk away and say, ‘See, there’s nothing but barren soil in that flower-pot.’ But three months later he’d come back and find that it had sprouted a rose bush which had come into blossom. I tell you I’ve been with Cynthia. I studied her. I’ve seen her and I know.”

  Clane sat silent and the other seemed to have no feeling of resentment for that silence, to consider it as purely normal.

  “You can believe it or not,” Harold went on, “but I liked Farnsworth. Farnsworth was an interesting chap. He had a lot on the ball. And he had a lot of thoughts that many people don’t have. The day Farnsworth was killed I went to see him, and there was something on Horace Farnsworth’s mind. He tried to talk to me and couldn’t. He bogged down. It was something that had him on the ropes. I asked him if it was about Cynthia”s dough, asked him if he’d lost it. He said, no, that her money was all right. And then he told me that he’d got himself in a jam where there was no way out. He said he was licked. I couldn’t get out of him what it was. But I did learn that he was right on the ragged edge. He was … hell, Clane, the guy was getting ready to commit suicide.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I told him to wait right there, that I was going to be back, and I went out to Cynthia’s and got that figure of the man on the mule. I wanted to go back and talk to Horace Farnsworth about it. That philosophy has steadied me down in many a tight spot. The figure got to mean a lot to me. The old guy was a friend of mine, an adviser, a father-confessor. I was hoping that I could talk to Horace Farnsworth and make him understand something of what I saw in the figure.”

  Harold ceased talking, and the silence of the cell enveloped them.

  Clane shifted his position on the stool. Harold sat with his elbows on his knees, motionless, brooding, dreaming of the past and of the strange whim of fate which had trapped him in the meshes of a first-degree murder charge, left him an outcast among his fellows, a man condemned to death.

  “Funny thing,” Harold said, musing, after a while, “the way Fate has tricked things around. There I was, wanting to go to Farnsworth to give him some sort of a philosophical life, and as a result I have to die.”

  “You’re not at the end of your rope yet,” Clane said.

  Harold might not have heard him. “It’s not that I am afraid to die. I want to live, but that doesn’t mean I’m afraid to die … only to the extent that man fears the unknown. After all, what is death?”

  “A name,” Clane said.

  “How’s that?”

  “I said death was nothing but a name, a label. When man encounters something he can’t understand and doesn’t know how to study, he puts a label on it and then dismisses it. Just so a thing has a tag …”

  “How could you study death?” Harold interrupted.

  “By studying life.”

  “Death is different from life.”

  “Who said so?”

  Harold thought that over, then laughed, a short, nervous laugh. “Well, of course, it’s always taken for granted that it has to be different from life. It’s the antithesis of life.”

  “How about birth?” Clane asked.

  “That’s life.”

  Clane said “What we call life is merely a segment. It’s a narrow band stretching from birth to death. Granted the phenomenon of birth, we necessarily have the corollary of death. It’s all a part of life. The trouble is that we don’t have enough confidence in the Divine Architect. We think of Him as being able to plan the universe and control the he
avens, but we’re not entirely certain. He knows what he’s doing when it comes to our lives. We’re just a bit uneasy that the divine scheme of things may be unjust, unpleasant, and inefficient. Therefore, we regard death as something which may have intruded upon the scheme of things when the Divine Architect had his back turned. We should realize that It’s part of life because it has to be, and that if the Divine Architect planned it, it should be beneficent… However, as you were saying, you intended to go back and see Farnsworth. I presume you took the image along?”

  Harold nodded. “I went to Cynthia’s, got the image, took it over to show Horace Farnsworth. I thought the story of that man on the mule might help him. Somehow I didn’t feel his trouble was as big as he thought it was.”

  Harold ceased talking again then after a moment said “I suppose that when a man really faces death he becomes somewhat detached from life. I can see things now more as a bystander.”

  Clane waited. Harold remained silent.

  “You were talking about going back to Farnsworth’s,” Clane prompted.

  “That’s right. I wanted him to see that figure. I thought it might help him to get a grip on himself.”

  “Did it?” Clane asked.

  “It was too late. I went up to the front door and rang the bell. There was no answer. I pounded on the door, still no answer, I was worried. When I left him, I had an idea he was ready to something desperate. So I walked around the house. When I came to the back door, I tried it. It was unlocked. I opened it and went in.”

  “The house was quiet. I went on through the kitchen, into the study. He was there—dead.”

  “He was in his chair, his head over on the desk. There was a bullet wound in the head and blood was dripping down to the floor. I thought at the time that he”d killed himself. I ran over and took hold of his shoulders, trying to straighten him up. When I did that, the body slumped down to the floor, overturning the swivel chair in which he was sitting.”