The Case of the Lonely Heiress

by Erle Stanley Gardner

  “What’s the idea?” the officer asked.

  Mason said, “This man who is with you is a congenital liar. He’ll change his story just as soon as the full significance of it dawns on him.”

  Caddo said, “You keep calling me a liar and I’ll push your teeth …”

  “Shut up,” the radio officer said to him and then turned back to Mason. “What are you getting at?”

  “Do you know me?” Mason asked.

  “No.”

  “I’m Perry Mason, the lawyer.”

  “Let’s take a look at you,” the officer said. He pushed Mason over so that the beam of the flashlight shone fully on the lawyer’s face. “Damned if you ain’t,” he said.

  “And this is Miss Street, my secretary.”

  “All right, Mr. Mason. What are you doing here?”

  “Trying to get in,” Mason said. “Apparently your watchman upstairs is sound asleep. I’ve been ringing the bell for it must have been as much as ten minutes.”

  “There isn’t any watchman upstairs.”

  “What?”

  “That’s right. This place is in my territory. We haven’t enough men to leave a watchman up there. I’m supposed to keep my eye on the place.”

  “No wonder we couldn’t get any answer to our ring,” Mason said.

  “He wasn’t ringing,” Caddo said angrily. “He’s been up there. He and his secretary opened the door and went up.”

  “Opened the door!” Mason said.

  “You heard me. That’s what I said.”

  Mason laughed. “What makes you think we opened the door?”

  “I saw you. I saw you go in!”

  “You saw us go in?”

  “That’s right. You heard me.”

  Mason laughed. “You saw us come up on the porch and ring the bell. You saw us in the same position that we’re in now.”

  “No, I didn’t. I saw you get the door open and actually go inside.”

  “Oh, no, you didn’t,” Mason said, and then, turning to the officer, observed, “See I told you he’d try to change his story as soon as he realized what the situation was.”

  “I’m not changing my story. That’s what I said all along.”

  “That’s what he told me,” the officer said, “that you two had gone in. He told me that the minute I picked him up at the restaurant where he’d been telephoning. He said that two people had gone in….”

  “He surmised they’d gone in,” Mason interrupted.

  “I saw you go in,” Caddo said.

  Mason said condescendingly to the officer, “You see what happened. He saw us come up on the porch and assumed we were going in, so he tore off immediately to get to a telephone. Now that he realizes we didn’t go in and that he actually didn’t see us go in, he’s trying to make up a case.”

  “I’m not doing any such thing.”

  “I don’t think he is,” the officer said. “His story to me was that you’d gone in.”

  “Don’t you get it?” Mason said. “He admitted here three times that just as soon as he saw us come up on the porch, he dashed off to a telephone.”

  “He did, at that,” the officer said dubiously.

  “That isn’t what I meant,” Caddo said, raising his voice, “I meant that as soon as you came up on the porch I knew what you were going to do, and I got all ready to make a dash. You opened the door and the minute you did that, I …”

  “See,” Mason said, laughing. “He’s trying to lie out of it. I told you he would.”

  Caddo said, “I never said any such thing.”

  “I think you did,” Mason said.

  “I’ll leave it to the officer. I …”

  Mason said, “Della, read just what Caddo did say.”

  Della Street tilted her shorthand notebook so the light struck on the page and then read slowly:

  “(Mr. Caddo): ‘I didn’t wait. The minute I saw you at the door, I knew it was going to happen, and I made a dash to the telephone.’

  “(Mr. Mason): ‘I thought so.’

  “(Mr. Caddo): ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  “(Mr. Mason): ‘The minute you saw us come up here to this door, you went dashing off to the nearest telephone.’

  “(Mr. Caddo): ‘I’ve already told you that.’

  “(Mr. Mason): ‘You certainly have. I want you to get the significance of that, officer. The minute he saw us come up here on the porch, he dashed to the telephone.’

  “(Mr. Caddo): ‘Because I knew what you were trying to do. I knew you were going to get in here and plant some evidence on my wife. I’d had a suspicion all along that you’d do something like that. You … Hey, officer, that woman is taking this stuff down in shorthand.’”

  “There you are, officer,” Mason said. “She took it down in shorthand, in black and white. That’s word for word what the man said.”

  “I think it is!” the officer said. “I think she’s got it right.”

  “Well, that wasn’t what I meant,” Caddo said. “I know they went in here. I saw them open the door.”

  Mason laughed. “How did we get the door open?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps it was unlatched, or perhaps you had a key.”

  “Want to search me?” Mason asked, holding his arms out.

  “Since you’ve given me the invitation, I’ll take a look,” the radio officer said.

  He patted Mason’s figure first, looking for weapons, then felt of each pocket. “You don’t seem to have anything except small stuff,” he said.

  Mason started emptying his pockets on the porch, turning each one of his pockets wrong-side-out as it was emptied, putting the belongings in a small pile in the center of the light cast by the police car.

  Suddenly a porch light clicked on. A woman’s voice, coming from a lower flat, shrill with fright, said, “I’ve telephoned for the police. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but …”

  “We are the police,” the officer said, showing his badge.

  “Well, I telephoned the police station and …”

  “That’s all right. The police station knows I’m here,” the radio officer said, his eyes on the growing assortment of stuff that Mason was taking from his pockets.

  “There you are,” Mason said, showing that each pocket had been turned wrong-side-out. “You don’t see any burglary tools there, do you?”

  “Perhaps it was a key,” Caddo suggested.

  “You don’t see any key.”

  “His secretary has it!”

  Mason said, “If there’s any doubt about that, you can take my secretary to Headquarters and we’ll have a police woman search her, officer. But …”

  “Let me look in your purse,” the officer said to Della Street.

  He opened Della Street’s purse, looked through the miscellaneous contents, pulled out a key ring, said, “What’s this key to?”

  “My apartment.”

  “And this key?”

  “Perry Mason’s office.”

  “And this one?”

  “My garage key.”

  “Don’t let her fool you,” Caddo warned. “How do you know that’s what they are? That key she says is to Mason’s office can well be something else. You …”

  “I don’t care what it is,” the radio officer said, “unless it’s a key to this door. We’ll find out about that right now.”

  One by one, he tried to fit the keys to the lock. None of the keys would slide in.

  “Not even the same grooves,” the officer said. He returned the keys to Della’s purse, closed the purse and handed it to Della Street.

  “She’s got it down her stocking top,” Caddo said. “How do you know …”

  “Oh, shut up!” the officer told him. “You’ve been wrong on everything so far. What the hell are you trying to do anyway?”

  “I’m trying to see that …”

  “You’ve been laying out here watching this apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “All night?”
>
  “All night.”

  “That looks fishy to me, on the face of it,” the officer said.

  Mason merely smiled.

  Caddo said impatiently, “I tell you, the guy’s clever. I had an idea he’d …”

  Mason said, “Anyhow, Caddo, you took it on yourself to be a self-appointed watchman for this place. Is that your story?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why didn’t you have some police officer accompany you or wait with you?”

  “You know why. I didn’t have anything to go on except suspicion. I …”

  “You had a talk with Lieutenant Tragg tonight, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And at the time of that talk I told Tragg that you had heard your wife admit she’d been out here and had an argument with Rose Keeling.”

  “I never heard any such statement. My wife never said that, or anything like it.”

  “But, despite the fact that your wife never said any such thing, you, instead of going back to bed, jumped in your car and came out here to watch this flat, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  Mason smiled. “If you’d never known Rose Keeling, how did you know where the flat was?”

  “I… I had the address.”

  Mason laughed at the radio officer and said, “If you want to do yourself a good turn, lock this guy up.”

  The officer’s head nodded almost imperceptibly.

  Caddo, in a sudden panic, said, “You can’t get away with that stuff! Officer, I telephone you when I see people breaking into a house, and you come up and let them talk you out of it.”

  “Nobody’s talking me out of anything,” the officer said, “but I don’t get the sketch. I don’t see what you were sticking around here for instead of being in bed and, personally, I don’t think you saw them go in that door. I don’t think they got in the door. I think they were standing here ringing the bell. Come on, now, break it up. On your way, all of you. I know who this man is and I can reach him whenever I want him. I’ll make a report as to exactly what happened.”

  “And I’ll make a report,” Caddo said. “When Lieutenant Tragg … Damn it, I’ll call Lieutenant Tragg myself!”

  “Okay,” the radio officer said, “go ahead and call him. But I don’t see anything here that won’t keep until morning. I’ll make a report so Lieutenant Tragg can do whatever he wants to.”

  Mason said, “I demand, for the protection of my client, as well as myself, that a police guard be placed in charge here. I want to see that this evidence is preserved without being disturbed.”

  “We’re short of officers,” the man said apologetically. “There’s been a lot of crime and …”

  “I’m making that request,” Mason interrupted. “I’m making a formal demand on the police. In view of the fact that it now appears that Caddo is trying to enter that flat, I demand a guard.”

  The officer said, “I’m going to dump this whole thing in the lap of Headquarters.”

  Mason said, “You have a two-way radio phone there in your car. Go call them.”

  “You getting this, Jack?” the officer called out to his partner who had been sitting in the car.

  “Some of it.”

  “Put through a call to Headquarters and tell them Mason is demanding a guard for this place.”

  “On the ground that one of the interested parties was apprehended prowling around the place,” Mason said.

  “You mean me?” Caddo asked.

  “I mean you.”

  “I haven’t been apprehended and I wasn’t prowling.”

  “All right,” Mason said, laughing sarcastically. “Tell Headquarters that one of the chief suspects in the case has constituted himself a self-appointed guard to keep the fiat under surveillance. When Homicide hears about that, they’ll want a guard.”

  The officer said, “Okay, just a minute.”

  He rolled up the window of the car so they could not hear him talking while he put through his call to Headquarters.

  A few moments later he rolled down the window of the car. “Okay,” he said, “Headquarters is sending out a guard.”

  18

  Judge Osborn looked up from the papers he had been reading and said, “People versus Marilyn Marlow.”

  “Ready for the Prosecution,” James Hanover said.

  Mason arose. “Your Honor, the defendant is in court, represented by counsel. She has been advised of her rights and is ready to proceed with the preliminary hearing. The charge is first-degree murder and I am appearing upon behalf of the defendant.”

  Deputy District Attorney Hanover said, “In view of Counsel’s statement, I will proceed with the evidence at this time. Call Dr. Thomas C. Hiller.”

  Dr. Hiller was sworn in, droned through a list of his qualifications as an expert medical witness, tesitfied that he had been called to the apartment of Rose Keeling, that he had tentatively fixed the time of death at about noon of the day on which he was called, perhaps a half hour earlier. He had subsequently performed a postmortem. There had been a blow on the head of sufficient force to render the decedent unconscious. Apparently while unconscious, she had been stabbed in the back with a knife having a blade approximately an inch and two-tenths in width and a thickness of perhaps two-tenths of an inch at the heaviest part of the knife. The length of the blade was, of course, something that he couldn’t swear to, but it had penetrated the body of the deceased to approximately seven inches.

  Dr. Hiller gave it as his opinion that death had been practically instantaneous from the stab wound, but pointed out that also, in his opinion, the stab wound had been inflicted after the decedent had fallen to the floor and was stretched motionless and in approximately the same position as that in which her body had been found.

  There had been considerable hemorrhage. The knife had been thrust in from the back or slightly to one side of the back. Microscopic tests he had made of the nails and other tests had indicated to him that the decedent has been bathing but a short time before the fatal injuries were inflicted.

  “Cross-examine!” Hanover snapped truculently.

  “No cross-examination,” Mason said.

  Lieutenant Tragg was called to the stand.

  He testified to his official position, testified to having been called to Rose Keeling’s flat on the day of the murder.

  Asked to comment on the condition of the flat when he arrived, Tragg stated that Perry Mason and his secretary, Della Street, were, when he arrived, alone in the place with the body of the murdered woman.

  He then went on to describe further the condition of the room, from time to time identifying photographs which were offered and received in evidence as being photographs taken under the supervision of the police force.

  Then Hanover brought Tragg around to the effort he had made to find the murder weapon.

  “Just tell the Court what search you made.”

  “I looked through the flat, searching for the murder weapon. I couldn’t find it anywhere.”

  “Now,” Hanover said, “I will ask you whether or not you located an automobile belonging to the defendant in this case.”

  “I did.”

  “Where was it?”

  “In a public rental garage.”

  “And do you know who had left it there?”

  “I only know what was told me.”

  “You cannot, of course, testify as to that. Is the proprietor of that garage in court, the one who gave you the information?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hanover smirked triumphantly.

  Mason said, “There’s no need to call him. I will stipulate that I drove my client’s car into a public storage garage and left it there while my client went to a private sanitarium after she had been released on a writ of habeas corpus.”

  “Very well,” Hanover said. “That will save time. Thank you.”

  He opened a small handbag, removed a box and approached the witness stand. From the box he removed a knife, stained and en
crusted with dried blood.

  “Lieutenant Tragg, I’ll ask you if you ever saw this knife before.”

  “Yes, I have seen that knife before. I can identify it because it has my initials scratched on the handle. I found that knife under the floor mat in the trunk compartment of the defendant’s automobile. At the time I found it, it was in exactly the same condition as it now appears, except that some of the encrusted blood stains on the blade have been subjected to chemical tests in the police laboratory. This has somewhat altered their appearance. There is also a slight change in the appearance of the knife, in that the handle and portions of the blade have been dusted with powder for the purpose of developing latent fingerprints.”

  “Were any developed?”

  “No, sir, none were developed. The handle had been very carefully wiped, so as to remove all traces of fingerprints.”

  “That’s a conclusion of the witness,” Mason protested.

  Lieutenant Tragg smiled, and said, “Well, I will put it this way: The handle was absolutely devoid of all latent fingerprints, all prints of any sort. Not even the faintest smudge.” He added triumphantly, “And, as a man who has had considerable experience with homicide cases and the development of latent fingerprints, I know that such a condition couldn’t possibly have existed unless the handle had been very carefully wiped.”

  “Are you,” Mason asked Hanover, “preparing to introduce this knife in evidence?”

  “Exactly,” the deputy district attorney said.

  “Under the circumstances,” Mason announced, “there will be no objection. Go right ahead and put it in evidence.”

  Judge Osborn seemed frankly puzzled. “Of course,” he pointed out, “there has been as yet no attempt to show that this is the so-called murder weapon. While it is true that the decedent apparently died from a stab wound, and I gather that the dimensions of the knife are approximately similar to the width of the stab wound, there is as yet no other evidence.”

  “Exactly,” Hanover said. “I have other evidence, Your Honor, which I would wish to introduce.”

  “But,” Mason interpolated, “the deputy district attorney wishes to introduce this knife in evidence. It has been identified as the knife which was found in the defendant’s automobile, and I have no objection to it being received in evidence.”