“Why?” Drake asked.
Della Street gave a sudden, quick gasp. “Oh,” she cried, “I know why! Anyone would, if he stopped to think about it.”
Drake shook his head and got up.
“Where are you going, Paul?” Della demanded.
“I’m going out to buy a cat so I can study him and learn about some of the important facts of life.”
“You would, at that, you know,” Mason told him seriously.
“Good night,” Drake muttered lugubriously.
With Paul Drake gone, Mason turned to Della. “You know, Della, this has been more of a strain on you than I realized. As soon as the jury brings in its verdict tomorrow, what do you say we take a run out to the desert—around Palm Springs or Indio. We’ll do some horseback riding, lie in the sun—”
“Perry, I may be convicted tomorrow.”
Mason grinned. “You forget those two women on the jury who know cats.”
“Aren’t you going to explain any more to the jury?”
“Not a bit.”
“Why?”
“Because if I did, I’d be explaining to Hamilton Burger. I’m going to let him fry in his own grease.”
“What will Lieutenant Tragg do?”
“Eventually,” Mason said, “Lieutenant Tragg will solve the case.”
“But won’t it take the jury a long while to get the whole idea through its head?”
Mason said, “Now that’s something that would be a sporting bet. I’ll bet you five dollars that jury will be out for at least three hours. It’ll come in with a verdict of not guilty, but it’ll be a dazed sort of jury, with two triumphant women smiling at you, and the men scowling. Then we’ll start out for the desert, and Hamilton Burger will start talking with the jurors, trying to find out what it was about the kitten that broke the case. Then he’ll try to get in touch with me, and we’ll be out in the desert somewhere. Let’s forget it and dance.”
25
THE BIG car purred smoothly out through the velvety darkness. As only in the desert, the stars, stretching in a vast, arching sweep, were no less brilliant over the clear horizon than they were directly overhead.
Mason said abruptly, “Let’s pull off to the side of the road and soak it up, Della. It’s an incomprehensible spectacle—makes you forget this strange human biped who commits murder.”
They came to a wide place in the road. Mason pulled off, switched off his ignition, cut off the headlights, settled down into the cushions.
“I love the desert,” Mason said after a little while.
Della Street snuggled close. “We supposed to be working on this trip?” she asked.
“Uh huh. I’ve brought that brief along with me. We won’t go back to the office until we’ve finished it.”
She said, “Well, I owe you five dollars. It took that jury three hours and ten minutes to the dot. Chief, I know about the kitten, but what else happened?”
Mason said, “The kitten jumped up on the bed which was supposed to have been occupied by Franklin Shore; then it jumped down and went into the other bedroom and curled up in the middle of the bed which was supposed not to have been occupied by Tom Lunk. The kitten proves Lunk was a liar. The bed in the back bedroom hadn’t been slept in, and was cold. The bed in the front bedroom had been occupied and was warm.
“I don’t know whether you’ve ever thought about it, Della, but if a man has some hiding place which he thinks is safe, he naturally hides everything there. For some time Lunk had been putting the money he’d collected for playing his part in the game into the flour can—a typical hiding place for a crusty old bachelor. Then when he had to hide the gun quickly, he naturally hid it in the same place.”
“Why did he have to hide the gun?”
“Because, dope, after he got to bed, Mrs. Shore telephoned him from the hospital and told him to rush out to the house, crawl in through the window, and get the gun out of the desk. She suddenly realized police were going to search the place. It’s a wonder they hadn’t found it when they made the first search, but at that time Tragg was concentrating on the medicine cabinet and looking for poison.”
“I wish you’d tell me the whole story.”
Mason said, “Somebody poisoned the kitten. It was an inside job. The kitten hadn’t been out of the house. Komo might have done it, but he had no motive. The reason suggested by Lunk that he was trying out the poison was cockeyed because the kitten had been given such a large dose.
“You can figure out what happened. Mrs. Shore had a telephone call in the afternoon. After that call, she decided the time had come to commit the murder she’d planned so long and so carefully. She was tired of paying blackmail. She had to get Helen out of the house for some length of time, so Helen wouldn’t know she was away from home. She knew that if she could poison the cat, Helen would dash madly to a veterinary hospital. Gerald came in unexpectedly, but he went along with Helen, of course. Then she sent Komo out to get some stout. With the coast clear, she took Franklin Shore’s old gun, got into the car, and went up to the reservoir above Hollywood where Leech was waiting by appointment to collect another installment of blackmail. She paid the last installment with a .38 caliber bullet, came back, put the gun in the desk. She realized that suspicion might attach itself to her, so she poisoned the stout in the icebox, pretended she had symptoms of poisoning, and was rushed to a hospital. That helped direct suspicion even more toward Franklin Shore. It didn’t occur to her until after Tragg showed up that police would make a thorough search of the house. She realized then they’d find the gun. Police had her sewed up in the hospital, so she rushed through a telephone call to Lunk, and told him to go out and get the gun.
“Lunk was her accomplice. She’d groomed and trained him carefully in the details of what he had to do. All she had to do that afternoon was call him up after she heard from Leech and tell him to go ahead.”
Della objected, “But I thought Franklin Shore hadn’t told Matilda or anyone about Helen’s getting tight on the punch or rescuing the—”
Mason laughed. “Lunk, pretending to be Franklin Shore on the telephone, told Helen he hadn’t said anything to Matilda.”
Della said, “Well, I’ll be— So Lunk came up to the house to get the gun—and shot to keep from being caught doing it.”
“Yes. He crawled through the window, upset a night stand, and thinking fast—no fool, Lunk—tried to cover up by making sounds as though Mrs. Shore were walking across the room. He hobbled over to the desk, got the gun, and was just getting over toward the window when Jerry Templar opened the door and started to turn on the light. He fired a couple of shots, dropped to the ground, and then beat it back to his shack, probably in his car.
“Lunk was lying about not having gone to bed. He had been in bed when Matilda telephoned. When he went back to the shack, he hid the gun in the flour. Then he turned down the bed in the back bedroom, lay in it long enough to wrinkle the sheets, planted the cigar butt, then dumped the things out of the bureau drawer, and out of the closet. He took a street car to go back to the Shore house, hoping the police would pick him up and question him. Reluctantly he’d tell the story Matilda had cooked up about Franklin Shore turning up at his shack. The police would high tail it over there, and find all the planted evidence that Shore had been there but flown the coop after robbing Lunk. Of course, Lunk never expected they’d search the flour can. That was his own, particular secret hiding place . . . and they wouldn’t have searched it either if it hadn’t been for me.”
“How do you know all this?” she asked.
“The kitten’s actions show conclusively that the bed in the front room was warm. The one in the back room wasn’t. That is the key clue to the whole business. Lunk got up out of bed. The bed was warm. The kitten climbed in that bed. Lunk came back to hide the gun and the kitten got in the flour, was chased out, went to the bed in the back bedroom, jumped up on it, found it was cold, remembered the warm bed in the front room where it had previously been ly
ing, and went back there to crawl up and go to sleep. Lunk went out with his carefully prepared story for the police, expecting to run into them at the Shore residence. You picked him up instead. He wasn’t particularly anxious to tell his story to us because he wanted to tell it to the police; yet he had to pretend that he didn’t want to have anything to do with the police. He was afraid I wouldn’t pass it on to the police fast enough, so the minute he was free to do so, he gave an anonymous tip to Lieutenant Tragg over the telephone which resulted in his being picked up.
“Matilda had it planned out to kill a lot of birds with that one .38 slug by making it appear her husband was still alive and had done the job. Incidentally, his being alive—and of course the police would never be able to find him—would keep Gerald Shore and Helen from probating the estate, keep Helen from becoming financially independent, and save forty thousand dollars in legacies.”
“But why did she have Lunk telephone Helen?”
“Don’t you see? That’s the significant part of the whole business. Helen was the only one who really couldn’t have recognized Franklin Shore’s voice. She was only fourteen when he left. There’s a great difference between fourteen and twenty-four. Lunk could deceive her, where his voice probably would not have deceived Gerald.”
“What about Franklin’s personal belongings in the car beside Leech?”
“Matilda got out some of her husband’s old things and wrapped them up in one of his handkerchiefs and took them out with her. The laundry mark was a giveaway. Franklin Shore wouldn’t have carried the same handkerchief for ten years. The fact that the watch was wound up at around four-thirty shows that that was when Matilda got things ready to go out on her little hunting trip. People don’t wind watches at four in the afternoon. It’s so plain it stands out like a sore thumb.
“You know, Della, she might have got away with it if it hadn’t been for Amber Eyes. It was shrewdly worked out. She did one stupid thing, though.”
“What?”
“That note, supposedly from Leech, directing us out to the reservoir that she mailed on the way back from the murder. She wrote it as a Jap would, trying to pull Komo in as a red herring to confuse the trail. That wasn’t very smart.”
“But why was Leech blackmailing her?”
“He found out the truth.”
“What truth?”
“Remember the body that was found at about the time Franklin Shore disappeared—the unidentified body?”
“You mean that was Franklin Shore? Why, Chief, that’s impossible. That . . .”
“No, it wasn’t Franklin Shore. It was Phil Lunk.”
“Phil Lunk?” Della gasped.
“You see, Matilda Shore didn’t love her husband. What’s more he was about to ruin the man she did love. If Matilda could get Franklin out of the way, she would inherit his fortune and be in a position to indulge her lust for power; she could save Stephen Alber financially, and, later on, marry him. Our friend Lunk was her man Friday from the beginning. His brother was dying. They knew that his death was only a matter of days—perhaps hours. Matilda laid her plans with that in mind. When he died, the doctor who had been in attendance came in response to Tom Lunk’s call, and quite properly filled out a death certificate. But the body the undertaker picked up was that of Franklin Shore who had previously been given a dose of quick-acting poison. His body was waiting—probably outside in Lunk’s car, all ready for a quick switch. After disposing of his brother’s body, Lunk whisked Shore’s body off to the East to bury in place of his brother, and later lied about the time he’d left, saying it was before Shore’s disappearance.”
“But he had a mother in the East. Wouldn’t she have known it wasn’t the brother Phil?”
Mason grinned. “You’re still believing everything Lunk told you! I’ll bet you that five bucks I won from you today that when Tragg investigates, he’ll find Lunk never had lived in the place to which the body was taken for burial. Now here’s another clue. George Alber went to Lunk’s shack about midnight. Lights were on, but there was no sound from the inside. Lunk says he was listening to the radio before Franklin Shore came. If that had been true, Alber would have heard either voices or the radio.”
“But how about that post card from Florida?”
“That post card is really as much of a giveaway as what the kitten did,” Mason said.
“How?”
“Don’t you see? Because it was written in the winter of 1931, not the spring of 1932.”
“How can you tell?”
“He said he was enjoying the mild climate,” Mason said. “Florida has a good summer climate; but people don’t talk about enjoying a mild climate except in winter. Then he says, ‘believe it or not,’ he’s enjoying the swimming. He certainly wouldn’t have said that if he’d been writing from Florida in the summer, because then there wouldn’t have been any ‘believe it or not’ about enjoying the swimming.”
“But the card was postmarked in June of 1932.”
“Sure, it was,” Mason said. “But there was no date on the card, only on the postmark. People seldom date picture post cards. Don’t you see? There’s only one explanation. It was a card he’d written Helen when he and Matilda Shore had been visiting there the winter before. He’d probably slipped it in the pocket of one of his suits and had forgotten to mail it. Matilda found it when she was cleaning out his closet soon after his disappearance. It gave her a chance to ring in an artistic touch to the whole case. So six months after the ‘disappearance’ Helen gets a card mailed from Florida. I don’t know how Matilda got it mailed, but it could have been done in any number of ways. Too, that gave her a chance to concoct this story of the mysterious double, which would confuse the police even more when she wanted to arrange for a ‘reappearance’ and make it seem Franklin Shore had really killed Leech.” Mason sucked in a prodigious yawn. “I’m getting sleepy.”
Della Street said, “I think you’re the most baffling and the most exasperating individual I’ve ever known.”
“What’s wrong now?”
She said, “All these clues are so plain once you explain them. That’s what makes it so particularly exasperating. They’re so very, very plain. The answer is obvious, once you really look at them properly arranged. But somehow I can’t ever arrange them and interpret them.”
Mason said, “But it’s all there. The kitten jumping onto the warm bed, the handkerchief with a laundry mark ten years old, the watch that was wound at four o’clock in the afternoon—a time when no person would normally wind a watch. The post card sent in summer, but obviously written in winter . . .”
“And you’re not going to help Hamilton Burger figure this out?”
“Not a bit of it. Let him fry.”
“Are you going to let her get away with this, and . . .”
“She won’t get away with it,” Mason said. “Tragg will eventually figure it out. He probably has the kitten angle straight already. He’ll go digging up the body of Phil Lunk, and find it’s really that of Franklin Shore. He’ll begin to wonder who could have driven the car that struck down Tom Lunk, and will reason it out that it must have been the person who had killed Leech, trying to silence the lips of a man who might talk too much. And you have to hand it to Lunk. He played that most deadly efficient of all parts—that of a witness who is smart, but pretends to be stupid. His lying about Franklin Shore’s visit was a masterpiece. But that, of course, is one of the things an investigator has to remember. A murderer will naturally lie, and a person who is clever enough to work out an ingenious murder plan will be clever enough to work out an ingenious lie. Matilda had, of course, helped him. They’d worked that all out in detail. But if it hadn’t been for that kitten, they’d have fooled us—for a while, anyway.
“And believe me, darling, the next time I get in on a case, Hamilton Burger and Tragg won’t tell me the proper place for me is in my office waiting for clues to turn up. They’re going to be in a hot, hot spot for some time now, and when they finally d
o get it solved, they’ll realize I had the answers all along.”
Della Street confessed, “Well, I’ll tell you one thing. You had me scared.”
“Afraid you were going to get convicted?”
“I . . . I didn’t know. It seemed so darn hopeless when I saw all that circumstantial evidence piling up.”
Mason took one hand from the steering wheel to slip around her shoulders. “My dear, you should always have confidence in your lawyer,” he told her gravely.
Available now in hardcover and paperback:
Charlotte Armstrong. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Unsuspected
H.F. Heard. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Taste for Honey
Dorothy B. Hughes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .The So Blue Marble
Frances & Richard Lockridge. . . . . . . . . .Death on the Aisle
Stuart Palmer. . . . . . . . . .The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan
Ellery Queen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .The Dutch Shoe Mystery
Ellery Queen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Chinese Orange Mystery
Patrick Quentin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Puzzle for Fools
Clayton Rawson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Death From a Top Hat
Craig Rice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Home Sweet Homicide
Mary Roberts Rinehart. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Red Lamp
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Published in 2019 by Penzler Publishers
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The Case of the Careless Kitten Page 23