The Case of the Terrified Typist

by Erle Stanley Gardner

  “I’m going to slap her with a subpoena, put her on the witness stand, and tear her insides out,” Mason said grimly.

  “How long will it take you to find out where Walter Irving is right now?”

  “I’ll know as soon as my operatives phone in the next report. I’ve got two men on the job. Generally, they phone in about once an hour.”

  “When you locate him, let me know,” Mason said. “I’ll be in my office.”

  Della Street smiled at Paul Drake. “Dinner,” she said, “has been postponed.”

  Chapter 12

  Mason had been in his office less than ten minutes when the unlisted phone rang. Della Street glanced inquiringly at Mason. The lawyer said, “I’ll take it, Della,” and picked up the phone.

  “Hello, Paul. What is it?”

  Drake said, “One of my operatives reported Irving is on his way to this building, and he’s hopping mad.”

  “To this building?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That leaves three objectives,” Mason said. “His office, your office, or mine. If he comes to your office send him in here.”

  “If he comes to your office, will you want help?”

  “I’ll handle it,” Mason said.

  “My operative says he’s really breathing fire. He got a phone call when he was right in the middle of dinner. He never even went back to his table. Just dashed out, grabbed a cab, and gave the address of this building.”

  “Okay,” Mason said. “We’ll see what develops.”

  Mason hung up the telephone and said to Della Street, “Irving is on his way here.”

  “To see you?”

  “Probably.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Wait for him. The party may be rough.”

  Five minutes later angry knuckles banged on the door of Mason’s private office. “That will be Irving,” Mason said. “I’ll let him in myself, Della.”

  Mason got up, strode across the office and jerked the door open.

  “Good evening,” he said coldly, his face granite hard.

  “What the hell are you trying to do?” Irving asked furiously. “Upset the apple cart?”

  Mason said, “There are ladies present. Watch your language unless you want to get thrown out.”

  “Who’s going to throw me out?”

  “I am.”

  “You and who else?”

  “Just me.”

  Irving sized him up for a moment. “You’re one hell of a lawyer, I’ll say that for you.”

  “All right,” Mason told him. “Come in. Sit down. Tell me what’s on your mind. And the next time you try to hold out anything on me, you’ll be a lot sorrier than you are right now.”

  “I wasn’t holding out on you. I—”

  “All right,” Mason told him. “Tell me your troubles, and then I’ll tell you something.”

  “You went out to call on Marline Chaumont.”

  “Of course I did.”

  “You shouldn’t have done it.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell me so?”

  “To tell you the truth, I didn’t think you could possibly find out anything about her. I still don’t know how you did it.”

  “Well, what’s wrong with going to see her?” Mason asked.

  “You’ve kicked your case out of the window, that’s all that’s wrong with it.”

  “Go on. Tell me the rest of it.”

  “I’d been nursing that angle of the case until I could get the evidence we needed. She was pulling this gag of having an invalid brother on her hands so she—”

  “That’s a gag?” Mason interrupted.

  “Don’t be any simpler than you have to be,” Irving snapped.

  “What about her brother?” Mason asked.

  “Her brother!” Irving stormed. “Her brother! You poor, simple-minded boob! Her so-called brother is Munroe Baxter.”

  “Go on,” Mason said. “Keep talking.”

  “Isn’t that fact enough to show you what you’ve done?”

  “The fact would be. Your statement isn’t.”

  “Well, I’m telling you.”

  “You’ve told me. I don’t want your guesses or surmises. I want facts.”

  “Marline is a smart little babe. She’s French. She’s chic, and she’s a fast thinker. She’s been playing around with Munroe Baxter. He likes her better than Yvonne Manco. He was beginning to get tired of Yvonne.

  “So when Munroe Baxter took the nose dive, he just kept on diving and came up into the arms of Marline Chaumont. She had a home all prepared for him as the invalid brother who was weak in the upper story.”

  “Any proof?” Mason asked.

  “I was getting proof.”

  “You’ve seen Marline?”

  “Of course I’ve seen her. After I got to thinking things over, I made it a point to see her.”

  “And did you see her brother?”

  “I tried to,” Irving said, “but she was too smart for me. She had him locked in a back bedroom, and she had the only key. She wanted to go to the all-night bank and transact some business. I told her I’d stay with her brother. She took me up on it.

  “After she was gone, I prowled the house. The back bedroom was locked. I think she’d given him a sedative or something. I could hear him gently snoring. I knocked on the door and tried to wake him up. I wanted to look at him.”

  “You think he’s Munroe Baxter?”

  “I know he’s Munroe Baxter.”

  “How do you know it?”

  “I don’t have to go into that with you.”

  “The hell you don’t!”

  Irving shrugged his shoulders. “You’ve started messing the case up now. Go ahead and finish it.”

  “All right, I will,” Mason said. “I’ll put that house under surveillance. I’ll—”

  “You and your house under surveillance!” Irving exclaimed scornfully. “Marline and her ‘brother’ got out of there within thirty minutes after you left the place. That house is as cold and dead as a last-year’s bird’s nest. In case you want to bet, I’ll give you ten to one you can’t find a fingerprint in the whole damn place.”

  “Where did they go?” Mason asked.

  Irving shrugged his shoulders. “Search me. I went out there. The place was empty. I became suspicious and got a private detective agency to get on the job and find out what had happened. I was eating dinner tonight when the detective phoned. Neighbors had seen a car drive up. A man and a woman got out. A neighbor was looking through the curtains. She recognized you from your pictures. The description of the girl with you checked with that of your secretary here, Miss Street.

  “Half an hour after you left, a taxi drove up. Marline sent out four big suitcases and a handbag. Then she and the taxi driver helped a man out to the car. The man was stumbling around as though he was drunk or drugged or both.”

  “And then?” Mason asked.

  “The cab drove away.”

  “All right,” Mason said. “We’ll trace that cab.”

  Irving laughed scornfully. “You must think you’re dealing with a bunch of dumb bunnies, Mason.”

  “Perhaps I am,” Mason said.

  “Go on and try to trace that couple,” he said. “Then you’ll find out what a mess you’ve made of things.”

  Irving got to his feet.

  “How long had you known all this?” Mason asked, his voice ominously calm.

  “Not long. I looked Marline up when I came here. She knows everyone in the Paris office. She was our party girl. She always helped in entertaining buyers.

  “She’s smart. She got wise to the Baxter deal and she put the heat on Baxter.

  “As soon as I went out to Marline’s place to call on her, I knew something was wrong. She went into a panic at the sight of me. She tried to cover up by being all honey and syrup, but she overdid it. She had to invite me in, but she told me this story about her brother. Then she kept me waiting while she locked him up and knoc
ked him out with a hypo. That evening she left me alone, so I could prowl the house. Baxter was dead to the world. She’s a smart one, that girl.

  “I was getting ready to really bust this case wide open, and then you had to stick your clumsy hand right in the middle of all the machinery.”

  Irving started for the door.

  “Wait a minute,” Mason said. “You’re not finished yet. You know something more about all—”

  “Sure I do,” Irving said. “And make no mistake, Mason. What I know I keep to myself from now on. In case you’re interested, I’m cabling the company to kiss their two-thousand-dollar retainer good-by and to hire a lawyer who at least has some sense.”

  Irving strode out into the corridor.

  Della Street watched the closing door. When it had clicked shut she started for the telephone.

  Mason motioned her away. “Remember, it’s all taken care of, Della,” he said. “Paul Drake has two men shadowing him. We’ll know where he goes when he leaves here.”

  “That’s fine,” she said. “In that case, you can take me to dinner now.”

  Chapter 13

  Della Street laid the decoded cablegram on Mason’s desk as the lawyer entered the office.

  “What’s this, Della?” Mason asked, hanging up his hat.

  “Cablegram from the South African Gem Importing and Exploration Company.”

  “Am I fired?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “What does it say?” Mason asked.

  “It says you are to continue with the case and to protect the interests of Duane Jefferson, that the company investigated you before you were retained, that it has confidence in you, and that its official representative in this area, and the only one in a position to give orders representing the company, is Duane Jefferson.”

  “Well,” Mason said, “that’s something.” He took the decoded cablegram and studied it. “It sounds as though they didn’t have too much confidence in Walter Irving.”

  “Of course,” she told him, “we don’t know what Irving cabled the company.”

  “We know what he told us he was cabling the company.”

  “Where does all this leave him?” Della Street asked.

  “Out on a limb,” Mason said, grinning, and then added, “It also leaves us out on a limb. If we don’t get some line on Mae Jordan and Marline Chaumont, we’re behind the eight ball.”

  “Couldn’t you get a continuance under the circumstances until—”

  Mason shook his head.

  “Why not, Chief?”

  “For several reasons,” Mason said. “One of them is that I assured the district attorney I’d got to trial on the first date we could squeeze in on the trial calender. The other is that I still think we have more to gain than to lose by getting to trial before the district attorney has had an opportunity to think over the real problem.”

  “Do you suppose this so-called brother of Marline Chaumont is really Munroe Baxter?”

  Mason looked at his watch, said, “Paul Drake should have the answer to that by this time. Get him on the phone, Della. Ask him to come in.”

  Ten minutes later Paul Drake was laying it on the line.

  “This guy Irving is all wet, Perry. Marline Chaumont showed up at the state hospital. She identified herself as the sister of Pierre Chaumont. Pierre had been there for a year. He’d become violent. The’d operated on his brain. After that, he was like a pet dog. He was there because there was no other place for him to be. Authorities were very glad to release Pierre to his sister, Marline. The chance that he is Munroe Baxter is so negligible you can dismiss it.

  “In the first place, Marline showed up and got him out of the state hospital more than a month before Baxter’s boat was due. At the time Marline was getting him out of the hospital, Munroe Baxter was in Paris.”

  “Is his real name Pierre Chaumont?”

  “The authorities are satisfied it is.”

  “Who satisfied them?”

  “I don’t know; Marline, I guess. The guy was going under another name. He’d been a vicious criminal, a psychopath. He consented to having this lobotomy performed, and they did it. It apparently cured him of his homicidal tendencies, but it left him like a zombie. As I understand it, he’s in sort of a hypnotic trance. Tell the guy anything, and he does it.”

  “You checked with the hospital?”

  “With everyone. The doctor isn’t very happy about the outcome. He said he had hoped for better results, but the guy was a total loss the way he was and anything is an improvement. They were damn glad to get rid of him at the hospital.”

  “Yes, I can imagine. What else, Paul?”

  “Now here’s some news that’s going to jolt you, Perry.”

  “Go ahead and jolt.”

  “Mae Jordan was picked up by investigators from the district attorney’s office.”

  “The hell!” Mason exclaimed.

  Drake nodded.

  “What are they trying to do? Get a confession of some sort out of her?”

  “Nobody knows. Two men showed up at the law office where she works yesterday afternoon. It took me a while to get the name of that law office, but I finally got it. It’s one of the most substantial, conservative firms in town, and it created quite a furor when these two men walked in, identified themselves and said they wanted Mae Jordan.

  “They had a talk with her in a private office, then came out and hunted up old man Honcut, who’s the senior member of the firm Honcut, Gridley and Billings. They told him that for Mae’s own safety they were going to have to keep her out of circulation for a while. She had about three weeks for vacation coming, and they told Honcut she could come back right after the trial.”

  “She went willingly?” Mason asked.

  “Apparently so.”

  Mason thought that over. “How did they find her, Paul?”

  “Simplest thing in the word. They searched Jefferson when they booked him. There was a name and address book. It was all in code. They cracked the code and ran down the names. When they came to this Jordan girl she talked.”

  “She tried to talk herself out by talking Duane Jefferson in,” Mason said grimly. “When that young woman gets on the stand she’s going to have a cross-examination she’ll remember for a long, long time. What about Irving, Paul? Where did he go after he left here?”

  “Now there,” Drake said, “I have some more bad news for you.”

  Mason’s face darkened. “That was damn important, Paul. I told you—”

  “I know what you told me, Perry. Now I’m going to tell you something about the shadowing business that I’ve told you a dozen times before and I’ll probably tell you a dozen times again. If a smart man knows he’s being tailed and doesn’t want to be shadowed, there’s not much you can do about it. If he’s smart, he can give you the slip every time, unless you have four or five operatives all equipped with some means of intercommunication.”

  “But Irving didn’t know he was being tailed.”

  “What makes you think he didn’t?”

  “Well,” Mason said, “he didn’t act like it when he came up here to the office?”

  “He sure acted like it when he left,” Drake said. “What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing to arouse his suspicions. Specifically, what did he do, Paul?”

  “He proceeded to ditch the shadows.”

  “How?”

  “To begin with, he got a taxi. He must have told the taxi driver there was a car following him that he wanted to ditch. The cab driver played smart. He’d slide up to the traffic signals just as they were changing, then go on through. My man naturally tried to keep up with him, relying on making an explanation to any traffic cop who might stop him.

  “Well, a traffic cop stopped him and it happened he was a cop who didn’t feel kindly toward private detectives. He got tough, held my man, and gave him a ticket. By that time, Irving was long since gone.

  “Usually a cop will give you a break on a deal li
ke that if you have your credentials right handy, show them to him and tell him you’re shadowing the car ahead. This chap deliberately held my man up until Irving got away. Not that I think it would have made any difference. Irving knew that he was being tailed, and he’d made up his mind he was going to ditch the tail. When a smart man gets an idea like that in his head, there’s nothing you can do about it except roll with the punch and take it.”

  “So what did you do, Paul?”

  “Did the usual things. Put men on his apartment house to pick him up when he got back. Did everything.”

  “And he hasn’t been back?”

  Drake shook his head.

  “All right. What about the others?”

  “Marline Chaumont,” Drake said. “You thought it would be easy to locate her.”

  “You mean you’ve drawn a blank all the way along the line?” Mason interposed impatiently.

  “I found out about Mae Jordan,” Drake said.

  “And that’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  “All right. What about Marline Chaumont? Give me the bad news in bunches.”

  “It took me a devil of a time to find the taxicab driver who went out to the house,” Drake said. “I finally located him. He remembered the occasion well. He took the woman, the man, four suitcases and a handbag to the airport.”

  “And then what?” Mason asked.

  “Then we draw a blank. We can’t find where she left the airport.”

  “You mean a woman with a man who is hardly able to navigate by himself, with four big suitcases and a handbag, can vanish from the airport?” Mason asked.

  “That’s right,” Drake said. “Just try it sometime, Perry.”

  “Try what?”

  “Covering all of the taxicab drivers who go to the air terminal. Try and get them to tell you whether they picked up a man, a woman, four suitcases and a handbag. People are coming in by plane every few minutes. The place is a regular madhouse.”

  Mason thought that over. “All right, Paul,” he said.

  “Irving told me we’d get no place, but I thought the four suitcases would do it.”

  “So did I when you first told me about it,” Drake said.

  “They went directly to the airport?”

  “That’s right.”