The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom

by Erle Stanley Gardner

  She said, “My employer asked me to come back and work tonight. He warned me he might be very late. He said he was going to a dinner party, but wanted to do some work just as soon as he was able to break away from the dinner. He wants to get away on a trip tomorrow.”

  “And so you sat on the fire escape waiting for him?”

  She grinned, “As a matter of fact, Mr. Mason, it was almost that bad.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She said, “I got up to the office about an hour ago. I waited and waited, and then I got tired of simply sitting there. I had finished with the evening paper and didn’t know what else to do. I switched out the lights and went over and sat on the window sill for a while and then, just for the lark of it, I got out on the fire escape and—well, it was dirty out there. I touched the rail and my hand got terribly dirty. That was a nuisance, because I was going to have to go down to the washroom and scrub the grime off.

  “But while I was out there, it was—well, it was sort of romantic and exciting, looking out over the city and thinking about all of the heartaches, all of the tragedies, all of the hopes—and then a key clicked in the lock, the door opened. I assumed, of course, it was my boss, and I wondered just how I’d account for my presence out there on the dark fire escape.

  “And then the light switch clicked on and I saw it was his wife!

  “I didn’t know what she wanted. I didn’t know whether she was there, trying to trap me, whether she thought that—well, I knew how I would feel under the circumstances.”

  “Go right ahead,” Mason said.

  “So,” she said, “almost instinctively, I moved down two or three steps, so that I would be out of her range of vision … I could still see into the office. I suppose it was natural curiosity that made me watch to see what she was doing. Well, then she moved over toward the window and I had to start down the steps of the fire escape.”

  “And the wind blew your skirts up.”

  She smiled, “And you had a point of vantage, Mr. Mason.”

  “I did,” Mason admitted, then added, “you instinctively put down your hand to hold your skirts in place.”

  “I’ll say! That wind meant business.”

  “And,” Mason said, “the hand held a gun.”

  “A flashlight,” she amended.

  “Exactly,” Mason said. “I’ll be a gentleman and take your word for it. It was a flashlight. And now, if, within the next five seconds, you can make a satisfactory explanation for the flashlight—No coaching from the audience, please—You have only three seconds left—two seconds—one second—I’m sorry.”

  She bit her lip and said, “The flashlight, you see, was one that I had taken with me so that I could have a light when I went to the parking lot to get my car. I—well, you know, I didn’t expect the boss would escort me back to my car, and a woman alone doesn’t like prowling around late at night in the back of a lot. After all, Mr. Mason, things do happen, you know.”

  “And so you took the flashlight with you when you went out on the fire escape.”

  “Strange as it may seem, I did exactly that. It was on the desk, and I picked it up as I went out. It was dark out there!”

  “That’s fine,” Mason said. “So now, if you’ll take me down and show me the automobile that you have parked, that will be all there is to it.”

  “Gladly,” she said, getting up from the chair with smooth grace, “I’ll be only too glad to do that, Mr. Mason. And you can check the license number, my driver’s license and the certificate of ownership on the steering post, and then I think that will conclude a very interesting meeting, don’t you?”

  “Definitely,” Mason said. “It’s been a pleasure even under such unusual circumstances. As it happens, I don’t know your name.”

  She said, “You’ll learn it when you see the registration on the automobile.”

  “I’d prefer to hear it from you first.”

  “Virginia Colfax.”

  “Miss or Mrs.?”

  “Miss.”

  “Let’s go,” Mason told her.

  Mason led the way to the door, opened it and stood aside for the girl to walk out. She tossed a friendly smile at him over her shoulder and, together, they walked down the corridor.

  As they passed Paul Drake’s office, near the elevator, with the windows lit up and the sign, DRAKE DETECTIVE AGENCY, on the door, the girl made a grimace and said, “I don’t like that place!”

  “Why not?” Mason asked.

  “Detectives give me the creeps. I like privacy.”

  Mason, pushing the elevator button and waiting for the janitor to bring the cage up, said, “Drake does all my work. It’s really a very methodical business—just like anything else. After you’re familiar with it, it ceases to have romance and glamour. It becomes matter-of-fact. At times I think Paul Drake is completely bored with it.”

  “I daresay,” she said, sarcastically.

  The elevator came to a stop. The janitor nodded. Mason placed his hand under the girl’s elbow as he guided her into the elevator, said, “You’ll have to sign the register, checking out.”

  She smiled at him, “I’m afraid you’re wrong, Mr. Mason. Since the Drake Detective Agency stays open all night, people who are going to that office don’t have to sign the register.”

  “Oh, did you go to them?” Mason asked.

  Her laugh held good-natured banter. “Of course. Where did you think I’d been? Stupid!”

  “We have an understanding that people going to the Drake Detective Agency don’t register,” the janitor explained. “They keep open twenty-four hours a day, you know.”

  Mason marked down his own checking out time, said to Virginia Colfax, “You certainly have a fast mind, a ready wit and a nimble tongue.”

  “Thank you,” she said frigidly.

  The elevator stopped at the lobby floor. She swept out, with her chin in the air, and Mason followed.

  At the door of the building she stood for a moment with the wind from the approaching shower catching her hair, blowing it back from her ears. The storm was now measurably closer and the occasional rumble of thunder at intervals drowned out the noises of the city street.

  She suddenly turned and put her hand on his arm. “I want you to know one thing,” she said.

  “What?” Mason asked.

  She said, “I’m grateful to you for being so decent about everything.”

  Mason raised his eyebrows.

  And with that, she swung her arm up from her side and slapped his face so hard that the sound of her open palm attracted the attention of a group of people who had just emerged from the cocktail lounge a couple of doors down the street.

  As Mason stood for a disconcerted moment, she sprinted across the sidewalk, jerked open the door of a waiting taxi and jumped inside.

  “Hey!” Mason shouted to the cab driver, “Hold that cab!” and started across the sidewalk.

  A bull-necked man, with the build of a stevedore and the tailored suit of a business executive, grabbed Mason’s coattail.

  “None of that, buddy!” he said.

  Mason whirled on him. “Take your hands off me!”

  The man hung on, regarding him with a grin. “It’s no dice, buddy, she doesn’t like you.”

  The taxi shot out from the curb and into traffic.

  Mason said to the heavy set man, “Let go of that coat or I’ll break your jaw.”

  There was something in his eyes which caused the man to fall back. “Now wait a minute, buddy,” the man said, “you can see that the dame doesn’t want …”

  Mason turned toward the curb, looked up and down the street for a cab. There was none in sight.

  He turned back toward the big man. “All right,” he said, his face white with wrath, “you’ve played hero in front of your party. I suppose you used to be a great boxer in the good old college days back in nineteen seventeen. If it’s any satisfaction to you, your interference has caused a lot of legal complications your mind is
too dumb to comprehend. Now get your damn fat face out of my way or I’ll push it in!”

  The man, abashed, fell back before Mason’s blazing fury.

  The lawyer pushed contemptuously past him, started back to the office, changed his mind, walked around the corner of the building to the entrance of the alley, then paced down the alley, moving slowly, searching carefully, exploring every foot of the pavement.

  There was no trace of either a revolver or flashlight.

  Mason walked back to the entrance of the office building, signed the register once more, was taken up to his own floor and stepped into the office of the Drake Detective Agency.

  “Paul Drake in?” he asked the girl at the desk.

  She shook her head.

  Mason said, “I’ve got a job for him. No great rush about it. Start him on it tomorrow morning. I want to find out something about the background of the Garvin Mining, Exploration and Development Company. I want to know whether a girl by the name of Virginia Colfax is employed there, and I want to know something about the Garvin who runs the outfit. Tell Paul not to spend too much time on it, but to get me the background and let me know when he has something to report.

  The girl nodded, and Mason walked on down the corridor to his office, where he again tackled the legal problem of trying to determine whether a statement could be considered as entirely extraneous and inadmissible as hearsay, or whether it could be classed as part of the res gestae and therefore admissible as an exception to the hearsay evidence rule.

  The lights in the adjoining buildings winked out one by one, until all the other office buildings were dark. Mason, engrossed in his subject, went on collecting case after case, showing the fine line of distinction between hearsay and res gestae.

  A vague uneasiness intruded upon his concentration. With his eyes absorbed by the lawbooks, a faint but unfamiliar scent insisted upon reminding him of his feminine intruder.

  At length he flung down his book and looked around. There on the floor was a handkerchief grimed with dirt that might have come off a fire escape.

  The handkerchief held the scent of a distinctive perfume and was neatly embroidered with the letter “V.”

  Chapter 2

  At ten o’clock the next morning Perry Mason, appearing before the State Supreme Court, sitting in back, was able, after a masterful thirty-minute argument bristling with authorities, to convince the high tribunal that the statement which had been received in evidence by the lower court was a part of the res gestae, and the Court thereupon affirmed a judgment previously awarded in the lower court to one of Perry Mason’s clients.

  Mason took a taxicab to his office, and shortly after eleven o’clock opened the door of his private office.

  Della Street, his private secretary, glanced up from her desk, smiled a greeting, and said, “How did you come out, chief?”

  “On top.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You look tired.”

  “I was up most of the night.”

  Della Street smiled.

  “Why the smile?” Mason asked.

  “Have you, by any chance, seen the newspaper?”

  “Yes, I saw the morning newspaper and …”

  “I’m referring to the early edition of the afternoon newspaper,” Della Street said. “You might like to see the Gossip Column.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  She raised two forefingers, rubbing one across the other and said, mockingly, “Naughty, naughty, chief.”

  “Now what?” he asked.

  Della Street placed a folded newspaper on his desk.

  Mason noticed a marked section in the Gossip Column on the inside page:

  What prominent lawyer, whose name has become almost a byword because of his uncanny skill in defending persons accused of crime, received the mitten in front of his office building last night? Who was the mysterious blonde spitfire who swung one from the hip and left the astonished lawyer groggy while she sprinted across to a taxicab? It must have been someone in whom the attorney had a more than ordinary interest, because only the physical restraint of an athletic bystander prevented the lawyer from dashing across the sidewalk to attempt forcible entry and detainer:

  And what was this lawyer looking for in the alley? Did the blonde pitch something out of his office window?

  And the party seemed so congenial until the haymaker.

  This handsome lawyer is the secret of many a heartbreak on the part of yearning debutantes who wish he would give them a tumble instead of being so engrossed in his law business.—Or is it that his office, with its competent employees, seems so attractive that he prefers the business environment to that of the socialites?

  In any event, one young woman in this city has registered her emphatic disapproval.

  Tut, tut, Mr. M!

  Mason’s face darkened as he read the column. “Damn snooping buzzard!” he said. “Why do newspapers have to employ people to snoop around in gutters?”

  “And alleys,” Della Street said.

  “And alleys,” Mason amended. “How the devil do you suppose he got the information?”

  “You forget that you’re pretty well known now,” she said. “Who was the athletic stranger?”

  “A big tub of lard,” Mason said. “I should have smashed his jaw. Some fellow trying to show off to the women with him. He grabbed my coat as I went by and gave her just enough time to get out of the way.”

  “Who was your girl friend?”

  “She said her name was Virginia Colfax,” Mason said. “Judging from the law of probabilities, I would say that there was possibly one chance in one hundred million that Colfax actually was her last name, but I have a hunch the Virginia part may be all right.”

  With a wry smile he told Della about the invasion of his office the night before.

  “And what did she want?”

  “She wanted out. I should have called the police in the first place.”

  Della raised her eyebrows. “Called the police?”

  “Well,” Mason said, “I admit it would have looked rather incongruous,” and then suddenly he threw back his head and laughed wholeheartedly. “A smart little devil,” he said, “and she certainly slipped one over on me. I thought I was escorting her down to the parking lot so she could point out her car to me.”

  “And something slipped?”

  “Something came up unexpectedly, Della—her right hand.”

  “Why?”

  “She was smart enough to know that bystanders would sympathize with a woman who was trying to get away from the pursuing wolf. She apparently knew that a taxicab customarily waited in front of our office building, and she knew that there would probably be people on the sidewalk … As it was, she had all the breaks. I definitely didn’t.”

  “I’m afraid,” Della Street told him, “that it’s not safe to trust you alone up here in the office. I told you I’d be glad to come up last night and work with you.”

  “I didn’t want to bother you,” Mason said. “I worked pretty late—oh well, it was an adventure, anyway.”

  Mason opened the drawer in the lower left-hand side of the desk, took out the handkerchief the girl had left behind.

  “What do you make of that, Della?”

  Della Street regarded the square of linen. “Dirty,” she said.

  Mason nodded. “She wiped the grime of the fire escape from her hands. What’s the scent, Della?”

  Della Street clamped a thumb and forefinger on a corner of the handkerchief, raised it gingerly.

  “Oh, oh,” she said, “your visitor uses expensive perfume.”

  “What is it?”

  “Ciro’s Surrender, I think.”

  “I’ll try and remember it,” Mason said. “What’s new in the office, Della?”

  “There’s a Mr. Garvin waiting outside,” Della Street said. “He’s anxious to see you. He has offices in the same building, on the floor above us, in fact—the Garvin Mining, E
xploration …”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” Mason said, “the Garvin Mining, Exploration and Development Company.”

  “You’ve noticed the name on the directory?” she asked.

  “Virginia Colfax,” Mason said, “was supposed to be a secretary working for that organization. By all means, show Mr. Garvin in. Let’s see what he looks like. There’s a chance he may be the other point of a triangle.”

  “He’s a well-rounded point, then,” Della Street said, laughing.

  “Heavy?”

  “Well-fed.”

  “How old?”

  “Around forty. Well-tailored, manicured. Probably accustomed to getting what he wants when he wants it.”

  “Well, well! Apparently he has the external appearance of a first point in a triangle. The second could be a jealous wife, and the third a blonde girl with smoldering slate-gray eyes, and a—well, you know …”

  “I believe ‘superb figure’ is the cliché you’re trying to think of,” Della Street said as she moved toward the door of the reception room. “I’ll bring Mr. Garvin in.”

  Garvin ostentatiously consulted his wrist watch as he entered the office. “Thought you’d never get here, Mason,” he said. “Been waiting twenty minutes. Damn it, I don’t like waiting for anyone.”

  “So it seems,” Mason said dryly.

  “Well, I’m not talking about this instance,” Garvin said. “I mean generally. I’ve noticed you coming in and out several times, Mason. Never thought I’d have occasion to consult you, but—well, that’s the way it is.”

  “Sit down,” Mason told him. “What can I do for you?”

  Garvin glanced at Della Street.

  “She stays,” Mason said. “Makes notes, keeps my time straight and my appointments.”

  “This is a delicate matter.”

  “I specialize in delicate matters.”

  “I recently married a mighty fine young woman, Mason. I—well, it’s important that nothing happen to that marriage”

  “Why should anything happen to your marriage?”