“Or by … Wait a minute,” Mason said. “How about a rope? Are there overhanging tree limbs, or …”
“There aren’t any trees there for a hundred feet. Then there are some big spreading oaks. But those trees are so far away they couldn’t possibly enter into the picture. No, Mr. Mason, you can take my word for it. I looked the situation over carefully. A person couldn’t possibly have entered that car or left it without leaving tracks; and the tracks I have on this map are every single track that is there on the ground. When the car drove up and stopped, there were at least two people in it. One of them was the woman who was evidently in the baggage compartment, and the other was a man who was either in the driver’s seat or who got out of the car on the left-hand side where a driver would naturally alight. That man walked around the car, stood in front of the headlights and moved his feet in the position that would indicate, first, he was looking toward the back of the car, second, that he was throwing a gun away. Then he kept right on walking in a beeline for Overbrook’s house. The woman came back, got in the car, and took the car away. That’s the only way the car could have been taken away. That woman came back, got in the driver’s seat and drove it away. The tracks tell the whole story. Whoever else was in that car when it was parked there, stayed in the car.
“You can see where the car was backed. The ground was a little soft here, and there was just a little skidding when the car backed around. Then it was driven back to the gravel surfaced road.”
Mason studied the diagram, drumming with the tips of his fingers on the edge of the desk.
“Well,” Drake said, “I guess that does it, Perry.”
Mason nodded.
“Of course,” Mason said after a moment, “I don’t suppose it’s possible to check these tracks as to a means of identity. In other words, a woman was in the luggage compartment. This woman got out, walked to the road, turned back and returned to the car and drove it away. The tracks don’t identify Mrs. Allred, merely some woman.”
“Fleetwood’s story identifies Mrs. Allred,” Drake said.
“And Fleetwood has lied at every turn of the road so far,” Mason pointed out.
“But on this angle he has corroboration,” Humphreys said.
Mason said, “I don’t trust that Bernice Archer, Paul. She might have been the one who was locked in the luggage compartment.”
“Not a chance,” Drake said. “Remember that Bernice Archer was in town Monday night. She got that call from the service station out by Springfield. She had a girl friend spending the night with her. They sat up and talked until about one or two in the morning and then slept together. There was only the one bed. I’ve checked Bernice Archer up one side and down the other. She was in her apartment all night Monday. Remember that Mrs. Allred stopped at that service station around seven o’clock and the attendant remembers her, remembers the car, and remembers Fleetwood. Then the car went over the grade sometime around eleven o’clock. It could have been sometime around half past ten, probably about half an hour before the clock on the dashboard stopped and Allred’s watch stopped.”
“The police don’t figure the car was driven over the grade at eleven o’clock when those clocks were stopped?”
“No, they figured Mrs. Allred set the clock and Allred’s watch ahead so as to give herself an alibi.”
Mason got up from his chair and started pacing the floor.
“You’ve got to take this evidence into consideration when you go before a jury,” Drake said, tapping the paper.
“I know I have.”
“This evidence,” Drake went on, “is the controlling factor in the entire case. Whatever story your client tells, Perry, has to coincide with the evidence of these tracks.”
“Her story doesn’t coincide with it, Paul.”
“It’ll have to, by the time she gets on the witness stand.”
Mason said, “If she’s telling the truth, Fleetwood must have picked up some other woman, put her in the luggage compartment, had her get out, run away, return and drive the car away. If she’s lying, then she’s trying to protect someone. The question is—who?”
“Patricia,” Drake said.
“Could be. But how could Patricia have been in the luggage compartment of her mother’s car? Do we know where she was on Monday night, Paul?”
“Apparently not.”
“Find out.”
“I’ll try.”
“Those tracks, Mr. Mason,” Humphreys said. “If you can find any way of figuring how that woman could get out of that automobile after she returned, you’re a better man than I am. She’d have had to have been an angel and had wings. The story is right there in the ground. She got back in the car and drove the car away.”
“And Fleetwood was there at the car only that one time?”
“That’s right. You can see his tracks leaving the automobile. He never returned to that car.”
“Unless perhaps Overbrook is lying about the time the boards were put there,” Mason said, “and …”
“No chance of that,” Humphreys said. “I talked with Overbrook’s neighbor. He saw him putting the boards down there this morning. Overbrook told him he was protecting some tracks that the sheriff might be interested in. The neighbor stood and watched him put the boards down, then drove on in to the post office. Overbrook came in just a few minutes later to telephone the sheriff.”
“You’ve sure as hell got to adopt Fleetwood’s story,” Drake said. “When he finally told the truth, he made a good job of it.”
Chapter 18
D. T. Danvers, known to his intimates as “D. Tail” Danvers because of his passionate devotion to every small detail in a case, had been assigned by the District Attorney to the preliminary hearing of the People vs. Lola Faxon Allred.
Danvers, a chunky, thick-necked individual, aggressively determined to have his own way in a courtroom but personally friendly with the men who opposed him, paused by Mason’s chair to shake hands before court opened.
“Well,” he said, “I suppose this is going to be the same old runaround. You’ll be sitting there making objections, trying to get us to put on just as much of our case as possible so you can stand off and snipe at it, and then when it comes to your turn, you’ll fold up like a camp tent with a broken guy wire and say, ‘Your Honor, I believe the State has established a sufficient case to warrant the Court in binding the defendant over, and under those circumstances I see no use in presenting any of our defense at this time.’”
Mason laughed, “What’s the matter, Danvers? Were you out on a camping trip where the tent folded up?”
Judge Colton ascended the bench, said, “People versus Lola Allred. What’s the situation, gentlemen?”
“The defendant is in court, defended by counsel,” Danvers said, “and the prosecution is ready to go ahead.”
“The defense is ready,” Mason announced.
“Call your first witness,” Judge Colton said.
Danvers’ first witness was the doctor who had performed the autopsy on the body of Bertrand Allred. He described the man’s injuries in technical terms, announced the cause of death, and gave it as his opinion that death had occurred sometime between nine o’clock and eleven-thirty o’clock Monday night.
“Cross-examine,” Danvers said.
“These injuries which you have described,” Mason said, “and which caused the death of the decedent—could all of them have been inflicted by means of a fall of fifty or a hundred feet while the decedent had been in an automobile?”
“With the possible exception of one blow which had been received on the skull, probably made with some circular instrument such as a gun barrel or a jack handle, or a piece of small, very heavy pipe.”
“That couldn’t have been caused by hitting the head in falling against some object such as the edge of the dashboard or the side of the steering wheel?”
“I don’t think it could.”
“Do you know that it couldn’t?”
“No, I don’t. Naturally,
there’s a certain element of surmise. The final resting place of the automobile in which the body was found was, I understand, some distance from the place where it struck the first time. Yet at the time that it first struck, there was the force of a considerable impact.”
“That’s all,” Mason said.
A police laboratory expert testified to examining a piece of carpet, similar to that usually placed in the luggage compartments of automobiles. There were stains on this carpet which he said were human blood.
“Cross-examine,” Danvers said.
“What type?” Mason asked. “What group did the blood belong to?”
“Type O.”
“Do you know what type blood the defendant has?”
“She also has type O.”
“Do you know what type blood the decedent, Bertrand Allred, had?”
“No, sir. I do not. I didn’t classify that.”
“You merely found out that the type of blood that was on this piece of carpet, which you understood came from the luggage compartment of the defendant’s automobile, was of the same type as the blood of the defendant. After that you ceased to be interested or to investigate further. Is that right?”
“Well, I …”
“Is it right, or isn’t it?”
“No.”
“Well, what did you do further?”
“Well, I … I made a careful investigation to prove that it was blood, and then that it was human blood.”
“And then you classified it?”
“Yes.”
“And found out it was type O?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And found out that the defendant had type O?”
“Yes.”
“And don’t you know, as a matter of fact, that between forty and fifty percent of the entire white race has blood of type O?”
“Well … yes.”
“And you felt certain even before you had made the test that the result of this test would show that this blood came from the body of the defendant?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then why did you type the blood of the defendant and the blood on the carpet, which you have mentioned?”
“Well, I wanted to show that it could have come from the defendant. Having shown that, there was nothing further that I could show.”
“And you didn’t type the blood of the decedent?”
“Wait a minute, I did, too. I have some notes on that. If you’ll pardon me just a moment.”
The witness took a notebook from his pocket, said, “The blood typing was incident to other matters and … yes, here it is. The decedent also had blood of type O—that isn’t particularly significant because as you yourself have pointed out, between forty and fifty percent of the white population of the world has blood of this type. The idea of my tests on the matter was not to show that the blood did come from the defendant, but that it could have come from the defendant.”
“And could also have come from anyone comprising fifty percent of the population.”
“Yes.”
“That’s all,” Mason said.
One of the traffic officers described inspecting the automobile with Allred’s body inside, mentioned that the automobile had been locked in low gear when it went over the embankment, and apparently had been deliberately driven off the road and over the bank.
Mason asked no questions.
“Robert Fleetwood, take the stand,” Danvers said.
Fleetwood was sworn, took the stand and testified, giving a full account of events leading to Allred’s meeting him and Mrs. Allred at the Snug-Rest Auto Court around ten o’clock Monday evening.
“Then what happened?” Danvers asked.
“He seemed cordial enough. He was still posing as my brother-in-law. He shook hands, asked me how I was feeling and if I was regaining my memory. I said I wasn’t and then Allred said we’d have to leave this court because he had much better accommodations down the road a piece.
“I didn’t have any baggage except a razor and some toilet articles Bertrand Allred had given me. Mrs. Allred had a very small suitcase. We were able to leave the court almost at once.
“Well, he’d raised the turtleback to put Mrs. Allred’s bag in there, and suddenly he whipped out a gun and ordered her to crawl in there. She refused. He hit her hard in the face, and she knew then he meant business. She crawled in. At that time I noticed her nose was bleeding.”
Convincingly he went on with his story, through the over-powering of Allred and starting for the Overbrook ranch. His recital tallied almost word for word with the story he had told Tragg and Mason previously.
“Did you know Overbrook?”
“Not personally, but I knew quite a bit about him from the books. He’d had some correspondence with us over a mining deal. I knew he wouldn’t sell me out to Allred.”
“So what did you do?”
“Well,” Fleetwood said, “I’d been pretending that I had amnesia. I thought it would be a pretty good thing to keep right on pretending. I drove the car up the road to Overbrook’s property, and about a quarter of a mile before I came to the house, I turned off the road in what seemed to be a nice open spot where I could get the car off the road and leave it. It turned out to be a soft spot where there was a certain amount of drainage from high ground on either side, which, coupled with the recent rain, had left the ground quite soft, but the car went in there all right.”
“In low gear?”
“In second gear, I believe.”
“Then what happened?”
“I moved the car off the road and stopped it.”
“Then what?”
“Mrs. Allred had evidently used a jack handle to pry back the catch on the door of the turtleback …”
“You don’t know she had used a jack handle?”
“No. All I know is that when she was put in there, the catch was shut, but when I stopped the car, she had got the catch open.”
“And what happened?”
“Almost as soon as I stopped the car, she pushed up the turtleback of the car and jumped out of the luggage compartment to the ground and started to run.”
“In which direction?”
“Back. Toward the road we had just left.”
“Did you say anything?”
“I called to her and said, ‘You don’t need to run. He’s knocked out. He’s absolutely unconscious.’”
“Did she say anything?”
“No. She just kept on running.”
“But your voice was loud enough so she must have heard you?”
“Sure, she heard me.”
“Then what?”
“I didn’t bother with her any more. I remembered Allred’s gun that I was still holding. I threw that gun just as far as I could throw it.”
“In which direction?”
“I think in a general north—well, a northeasterly direction from the car.”
“Then what happened?”
“There weren’t any lights in Overbrook’s house, but I could hear the barking of a dog, and that guided me. I walked directly to Overbrook’s house.”
“Did you go back to the road?”
“No. I just hit a beeline for where the dog was barking.”
“Then what happened?”
“I got Overbrook up out of bed. I asked him if he could put me up. I told him I didn’t know who I was or anything about myself.”
“He agreed to?”
“Yes. He gave me a bed.”
“Did you go to bed?”
“Yes.”
“And did you at any time during the night leave that bed?”
“No. I couldn’t have. The dog was watching.”
“By the dog, you mean Overbrook’s dog?”
“Yes.”
“Where was he?”
“In the living room.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I sat up and sort of thought I’d look around. I heard the automobile start up, and wondered if Allred had
regained consciousness. I tried to open the door and look out, but the dog was there and he growled.”
“Wasn’t there a window?”
“That’s the point. The room was on the other side of the house, so I couldn’t see in the direction in which I’d parked the car. I wanted to get out and look through the windows of the other room in the house.”
“That was a rather simple house?”
“Yes.”
“Consisting of two rooms?”
“Four rooms. There was a room where Overbrook slept, a little kitchen, a room where I was sleeping and a living room.”
“Overbrook was there alone?”
“Yes. He was batching there.”
“What happened after that?”
The witness grinned and said, “I was trapped by my own device. Mr. Perry Mason drove up to the house and identified me and had a girl along who claimed I was her long lost husband. There was nothing I could do about it, without showing Overbrook that I’d been lying all along about the amnesia and I wasn’t in a position to do that. I still thought it would be a lot better for me to pretend that I couldn’t remember anything that had happened after that blow on the head, so I went along with them.”
“And what happened?”
“Mr. Mason took me to police headquarters.”
“Cross-examine,” Danvers said to Perry Mason.
Mason said to Danvers, “I suppose you have a map prepared showing the place where the car was parked and all that. You’re going to introduce it eventually. Why not bring it into evidence now, and give me a chance to cross-examine this witness in connection with the map.”
“Very well,” Danvers said, and handed Mason a map which was similar to the diagram Bert Humphreys had drawn for Paul Drake.
“We’ll identify this right now, if you want, with the testimony of the surveyor who made the …”
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” Mason said. “You can put the surveyor on later, but we have Fleetwood on the stand now and we may just as well finish with him.”
“Very well. And here are some photos of the tracks.”
“I’ll call your attention to this map,” Mason said, “and ask you if this seems to be a correct map or diagram showing the vicinity of Overbrook’s house?”
The Case of the Lazy Lover Page 18
