Tragg looked over to Mason.
The lawyer put down his drink, said, “I’m sorry, Lieutenant.”
“You got anything more to say than that?”
Mason shook his head.
“By God!” Tragg said. “One of these days, Mason, you’re going to step all over your tonsils. What the hell’s the idea rushing me down here on a bum steer like this? You’re mixed up in this thing up to your necktie, and you’re trying every way you can to get out. What’s this about her calling at your office and you smearing ink on your face?”
Mason said, “I’ve been guilty of underestimating Mrs. Caddo’s intelligence, Tragg.”
“And, by God, you’re underestimating mine!” Tragg said. “And for your personal information, we’ve now found some evidence that really connects your client with the murder. By ten o’clock in the morning I’ll have a warrant for her. If you hide her after that I’ll nail you as an accessory.”
“Who’s his client?” Mrs. Caddo asked.
“Marilyn Marlow,” Tragg said.
“That woman!” Mrs. Caddo exclaimed, and then added, “Did she kill this girl—what’s her name?”
“Rose Keeling. Yes, she killed her.”
“How do you know?” Mrs. Caddo asked.
Tragg grinned. “Among other things, we’ve found the murder weapon in her possession.”
“Well,” Dolores Caddo said, “you certainly shouldn’t want anything more than that!”
Mason said, “Before you go overboard on this thing, Lieutenant, I want to tell you what happened. Caddo wanted to get a lead on Marilyn Marlow, who was advertising in his magazine as a lonely heiress. At that time I think he was telling me the truth. He wanted to protect himself against a charge of false advertising. But once he found out who she was and had a look at her, he had an idea he might trade his wife in on a new model.”
“That’s a lie!” Caddo said.
“Naturally,” Mason went on, “he didn’t map out a plan of campaign all at once. He became convinced Marilyn was playing a game of some sort. He thought that he might be able to edge into the picture so that he could get a little money—and if he had to do it by some form of blackmail, he wasn’t going to be too squeamish. However, in the back of his mind was an idea that Dolores had given him about everything she had to offer, and it might be a good plan to shine up to Marilyn Marlow, feeling that he just might be able to hit the jackpot.”
“What was the jackpot?” Tragg asked.
“Reno,” Mason said. “Trading Dolores in on a more streamlined model with more money.”
“That’s a lie, my love,” Caddo said. “Don’t listen to him. He’s simply trying to make trouble.”
Dolores threw back her head and laughed. “How well I know it! He thinks I’m jealous. Well, Robert, darling, I know you wouldn’t do anything like that. You love me, and I know you love me.”
“Thank you, darling.”
“In the first place,” Dolores went on, “you couldn’t have got to first base with this heiress, and in the second place if you had, I’d have beaten your damn brains out before you could have stolen second base.”
“Yes, my love.”
“You know better than to try to two-time me. You might let your foot slip once in a while, but you wouldn’t really try to walk out on me.”
“No, my love.”
“You know what would happen if you did.”
“Yes, my love.”
Dolores smiled at Lieutenant Tragg and said, “Can’t you do something to keep this lawyer from trying to break up a perfectly happy marriage?”
Mason picked up his hat. “My congratulations, Mrs. Caddo. I hope you haven’t played all your trumps.”
“I haven’t,” she said sweetly. “Do stick around and have a drink with us, Lieutenant. My husband has some excellent Scotch in the kitchen. This prune juice is just some imitation stuff we dug out for this lawyer.”
“I’ll let you out,” Caddo said to Mason.
“Don’t bother,” Mason told him. “I’ve found my way out of worse places than this, Caddo. Good night!”
16
Mason stopped at an all-night restaurant, dialed Della Street’s apartment.
“Hello, Della. Gone to bed yet?”
“No. I’ve only been here a few minutes. What’s happened?”
Mason said, “I ran into something.”
“At Caddo’s?”
“Yes.”
“Want to tell me about it?”
“I think I do. How tired are you?”
“Not at all. I’ll wait.”
“I’ll be right out,” Mason promised.
He jumped into his car, made time through the night streets to Della’s apartment.
She had left the door slightly ajar so he could enter without knocking.
“Hello,” she said. “What do you want, Scotch and soda or coffee? I have them both.”
“Coffee,” Mason said. “I just had a drink.”
She poured him a big cup of coffee, added cream and sugar, brought out crackers and a plate of assorted tea biscuits.
Mason seated himself at the table, sipped the coffee gratefully, munched on tea biscuits, and said nothing.
She sat quietly across the table from him, refilling his coffee cup when it was half empty, waiting for him to think his way through the situation which confronted him.
At length Mason pushed the plate of tea biscuits away from him and took out his cigarette case. He held a pocket lighter for their cigarettes, then settled back in the chair and said, “I went to Caddo’s place. Caddo was a very much subdued individual. His wife admitted she’d been out to take Rose Keeling apart. She arrived about eleven-thirty, she says. That’s apparently approximate. She made a scene, tore Rose Keeling’s sunsuit, threw some fountain pen ink just as Rose Keeling made a dash for the bathroom to keep from being spanked. Rose slammed the bathroom door and locked it. Mrs. Caddo went out.”
“Chief!” Della Street exclaimed, her eyes big. “That accounts for it. That takes Marilyn Marlow off the spot.”
“Wait a minute,” Mason said. “Get the rest of it. I called Lieutenant Tragg. He came out there in a rush. I told him my story. Mrs. Caddo was just as sweet as honey on hot cakes. She told Tragg she’d never said any such thing. Caddo blinked, and backed her play. He said he’d been present during every minute of the conversation. He said nothing like that had been said; he thought perhaps I was trying to work some clumsy, amateurish third-degree on his wife.”
“What did Tragg do?”
“When I left they were buying Tragg a drink. Everybody was chummy and hotsy-totsy.”
“Can Tragg be that dumb?”
“It’s not that he’s so dumb. He’s completely hypnotized with the idea that Marilyn Marlow is the one he’s after. He can’t see any angle that doesn’t make Marilyn it. He’s found some new evidence. He says he’s found the murder weapon in Marilyn’s possession.”
Della Street’s face showed startled dismay.
“So,” Mason went on, “I guess our habeas corpus didn’t do much good. They’ll charge her now.”
“Chief!” Della exclaimed, “how could they have found—oh, Lord!”
Mason nodded glumly.
After a minute or two, Della Street said, “But why did Mrs. Caddo tell you that she’d been out there if she was going to lie later?”
“She may be smart. It may have been because she didn’t know Rose was dead until I told her. I spilled it because I thought she must know it. In other words, I’d pick her as the one who did it. She may have decided that a play like that was the best way to convince me that even if she had been out there, she had nothing to do with the killing. She may be really smart, that Caddo woman.”
“What’s going to happen now?” Della Street asked.
Mason said, “If we let events take their natural course, about ten or eleven o’clock in the morning Tragg will call at my office. He’ll say in effect, ‘Mr. Mason, you have Marily
n Marlow concealed somewhere. You know where she is. She’s charged with first-degree murder. I have here a warrant for her arrest. I want her. I’m calling on you to produce her. If you continue to conceal her, so help me, I’ll name you as an accessory and drag you in too.’”
“What can we do to stop that?”
“Nothing—once it happens. A murder warrant will have me on a spot.”
“Then between now and morning you have to think of some way of heading off Lieutenant Tragg?”
He nodded.
She smiled, reached across the table, put her hand over his and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “I take it,” she said, “you’re about to hatch up some skulduggery.”
“We’ve got to find a red herring somewhere.”
“Where?” Della Street asked.
Mason grinned and said, “That, my dear young lady, is the object of the meeting.”
She quietly got up from the chair, went to the kitchen, brought back the coffee pot and refilled Mason’s cup. Then she filled her own.
She returned the coffee to the stove, raised the rim of her cup as though proposing a toast to the lawyer, and said, “Here’s a good-by to sleep.”
“Good-by to sleep,” Mason said, and touched coffee cups, and then again they sipped their coffee and smoked cigarettes.
An alarm clock that was somewhere in the kitchen, ticking away the seconds, began to sound increasingly audible in the night silence which wrapped the apartment house.
Mason said thoughtfully, “We have to get some new evidence which will incriminate someone else.”
“How about putting a different interpretation on some of the evidence that Tragg already has?” Della Street asked.
“I’m turning that one.over in my mind,” Mason told her. “It would be a slick stunt if we could figure some way of doing it. Nice business if you could only get it!”
Mason’s thumb and forefinger slid down into his right-hand vest pocket, brought out a key, started tapping on the table with the key.
“What’s that?” Della Street asked.
“That,” Mason said, “is the key that Rose Keeling gave Marilyn Marlow, the key that enabled her to open the door and get into Rose Keeling’s apartment, the key she left on the table and the key I picked up and put in my pocket.”
“Oh, oh,” Della Street said.
“Are you reading my mind?” Mason asked.
She said, “I’m two paragraphs ahead of you.”
Mason said, “The big trouble with the case, as far as we are concerned, is that no one has a motive for killing Rose Keeling except Marilyn Marlow. The Endicotts are pure as the driven snow. Quite apparently it was to their interest to have Rose Keeling live. The very thing that gives Marilyn a motive gives Ralph Endicott a clean bill of health.”
“Plus an alibi, of course,” Della Street said dryly.
Mason nodded thoughtfully.
“And with Mrs. Caddo,” Mason said, “we have a peculiar situation: A jealous wife going out to raise the devil with a woman who she thought had been philandering with her husband. Her husband probably went tearing after her, trying to explain that, after all, it was merely a business proposition, that he was trying to cut himself a piece of cake by horning in on a will contest. Probably of all the alibis Robert Caddo ever had, this was the only one that he stood any chance of putting over. As soon as he could find his wife, he could convince her that she had better lay off. Now, according to the way events developed, he must have found her after she saw Rose Keeling and before she called on Marilyn Marlow. Otherwise, Marilyn Marlow would have had some ink stains and perhaps a few facial blemishes to add to her other troubles.”
“Stay with it,” Della Street said, smiling. “You’re doing fine.”
“And then,” Mason went on, “we run up against the fact there’s no motive for anyone to have committed the murder, other than Marilyn Marlow.”
“And,” Della Street said, “by a rare coincidence, we have the key to Rose Keeling’s fiat. Is that the sequence of ideas you’re seeking to impress upon my mind?”
Mason said, “It’s a temptation, Della.”
“Well, why not?” she asked.
“Several reasons,” Mason said. “One of them is that the police have undoubtedly photographed everything in the apartment. The other one is that they may have a guard on the job.”
“If they’ve completed their photographing and map-making, wouldn’t they simply lock the flat up and leave?”
Mason said, “They’re a little short-handed on the police force. There’s a very good chance that such is the case.”
“Well?” Della Street asked, smiling.
Mason grinned. “Get thee behind me, Satan.”
He continued to tap the key on the table.
Della Street refilled the coffee cups.
Mason said, almost wistfully, “It’s a lot of fun to yield to temptation, Della.”
“Isn’t it!”
“Once this damned idea has got in my mind, I can’t seem to think of anything else.”
“Just what could we do?”
“We couldn’t,” Mason said. “It’s something I’d have to do by myself, a chance I’d have to take …”
Della Street firmly shook her head.
“No need of both of us getting in a mess,” Mason said hastily. “In case something should go wrong, I’d need you to run the office.”
She said, “If we did get caught, we could say that we were just looking for evidence.”
“Yes, we could say that.”
“And we might get away with it.”
“We might.”
“What’s the worst thing against Marilyn Marlow, Chief?”
“Its hard to tell which is the worst,” Mason said. “If Tragg has a knife found in Marilyn’s possession, he’ll claim that’s the murder weapon and that, of course, will be the worst thing that could happen. I think he’s found a knife that could be it, but I don’t think he can prove it’s the murder weapon. However, Marilyn’s whole story is so utterly implausible. Here was Rose Keeling packing her suitcases, ready to leave town. She had written Marilyn Marlow, telling her that the will was no good. She had given Ralph Endicott a check for conscience money—the first installment of bribe money she had received. Of course, I’d take that with a grain of salt, Del-la. I think that it wasn’t entirely a matter of conscience. I think Ralph Endicott made some promises, but I don’t know how we’re going to bring that out. The fact remains the girl was packing her suitcases, ready to leave town. Yet Marilyn wants people to believe Rose told her that she wanted to go play tennis. And Dolores Caddo could substantiate that story if she only would tell the truth. But she won’t and that leaves Marilyn stuck with her story.”
Mason was thoughtfully silent over his coffee.
Suddenly Della Street said, “Gosh, Chief, I’ve got an idea. If—it’s so simple that it would be a cinch, and so daring it scares me.”
Mason cocked an eyebrow in her direction.
“Look,” Della Street said, the excitement making her voice run the words together, “how do we know she was packing? Everyone takes it for granted she was packing because the clothes were neatly folded and were in the suitcase and on the top of the bureau. But suppose that when it comes to a showdown, we can show that she was unpacking?”
Mason frowned thoughtfully, then his face broke into a smile. “Darling!”
“Just a few little things here and there,” Della Street went on. “Clues that would naturally have escaped the untutored, male eyes of the blundering cops, but things that you could bring out in front of a jury, things that would really mean something, particularly if we have some women members on the jury.”
“We’ll get the women on the jury,” Mason said. “But how are we going to find these little things that will make it appear she was unpacking instead of packing?”
Della Street said, “You leave that to me,” and made a run for her bedroom, emerging presently with a fur coat, and a ja
unty hat perched on one side of her head.
“What’s holding us back?” she asked.
Mason said, “My damn conservative disposition.”
“I was afraid of that,” she told him.
Mason got to his feet, took Della Street into his arms and kissed her. She laughed up at him, and he said, “Why is it your feminine charms are never so alluring as when you’ve thought of some piece of skulduggery?”
“It’s a subject we can discuss later,” she said. “Right now we have work to do. Suppose Tragg’s having the place watched?”
“That’s what we’ll have to find out.”
“And if we get caught?”
“We’re just looking for evidence—and if Tragg doesn’t believe that, your feminine charms will have to go to work again,” Mason replied.
“On Tragg? Let’s not get caught,” Della Street said.
17
Mason drove his car slowly past the four-flat house.
“Take a good look, Della.”
“I’m looking.”
“All dark?”
“Dark as the inside of a pocket.”
“We’ll drive around the block,” Mason said, “and look for a police car. There’s a chance a guard might be sleeping inside the flat. If so, he’ll have a car parked around here somewhere.”
They cruised slowly around the block, watching the license numbers of the parked cars.
“See anything official?” Della Street asked.
Mason said, “I think we’re in the clear, Della. We’ll circle around a couple more blocks, just to make sure.”
“How strong are we going to go after we get in?” she asked.
Mason said, “Just strong enough to rattle these birds on cross-examination and drive home a point to the jury. When you come right down to it, Della, no one knows whether Rose Keeling was packing to leave town or whether she had been planning on leaving town and was unpacking the suitcases when she was murdered.
“When the trial starts, the D.A. will put Lieutenant Tragg on the stand and ask him what he found when he discovered the body. Tragg will state that he found the body nude, sprawled on the floor in front of the bathroom door with the feet toward the bathroom, the air in the bathroom still steamy, the temperature of the tub warmer than that of the surrounding air, indicating that she had been taking a bath; that he’d found clothes on the bed and all that, and then he’ll go on to state that there were two suitcases open and that she had been packing those suitcases.
The Case of the Lonely Heiress Page 16
