The Crime and the Crystal

by E. X. Ferrars

  “And, in the circumstances, I believe that Wes’s first impulse, when he began to realize what he had done, was to give himself up. I think he went to the telephone, peeled off his gloves—the absence of fingerprints on the murder weapon itself could indicate a degree of premeditation—and, barehanded, started to telephone the police. But then the housekeeper called out, and Wes panicked and departed.

  “There is something rather wonderful about what took place after that. The horror of the deed was so great that it was completely blotted out of his memory. He couldn’t face it. His mind rejected it, and wove the whole thing into the fantasy which he was already partly living in. This became the work of the gang. The gang had killed his uncle, and Wes and his uncle, shoulder-to-shoulder, had been fighting their villainies. This fantasy allows him to live with himself. He has retired into his dream world, probably forever, and there we plan to leave him. But gentlemen, if proper therapy had been applied at the time of his first arrest, all of this would have been avoided. Now then, the gentleman who had some questions. Let’s hear from him.”

  All of the lawyers present were acquainted with Sidney Grant, who was known to his classmates as the “Gargoyle.” He looked, they claimed, like some evil figure leering down from a Gothic cathedral. They remembered him best in a characteristic attitude, sitting on the dressing table in the large attic bedroom which he had occupied for years, and frowning down on his guests like some Mephistophelian judge, while he argued endlessly.

  The Gargoyle had been called to the bar only a few months before, but, unlike most other young lawyers, he had not gone into an established firm. He had hung up his shingle and commenced the practice of criminal law in the lower courts, where he was already establishing a reputation as a tough battler.

  “Okay, Gargoyle, fire away,” someone said, and Dr. Heber smiled.

  “Question one,” Sidney Grant said. “Why such a stiff sentence for a first offense—on the theft charge?”

  “Answer one,” Dr. Heber said. “The magistrate was like some Fielding character. Wes Beattie broke down in court and made a rather sorry exhibition of himself. He was still trying to lie his way out of it, and he got this old Colonel Blimp magistrate pretty angry, so he threw the book at him.”

  “Question two,” Sidney said. “Why was he tried next day? Why wasn’t the case remanded for two weeks so that Beattie could get himself a bit organized? I mean, if he’d pleaded guilty he would simply have got a suspended sentence. If the case had been remanded…”

  A beautifully groomed young lawyer stood up at the back of the room. “Dr. Heber,” he said, “there is no use trying to protect me any longer. Gargoyle Grant is going to find out all about it, so I will confess. Sidney, I was Wes Beattie’s counsel in the magistrate’s court, and I have to take a share of the blame.”

  “James Bellwood!” Sidney said. “What were you doing in the police court anyway? Not your class of client at all.”

  “Mr. Grant,” Bellwood said, “you may go jump in the lake. Our clients get into the magistrates’ courts every now and then, usually by mixing alcohol with gasoline. But this case was different. For the visitors I must explain that I am a junior in a very high-class corporation law firm, the sort of firm that my learned and belligerent friend treats with amused contempt. And I will state that if ever one of our clients gets into an action in which Mr. Grant represents the opposition, we will advise him to settle right away, because Mr. Grant is going to be one of our great courtroom lawyers.”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere, Bellwood,” Sidney Grant said with a satanic grin. “Tell us about the Beattie bit.”

  “Very well. I will have to stick my neck out a bit, but I trust you will regard this confession as being under the seal. My firm has a client called the Superior Trust Company. The secretary of the company is one Ralph L. Paget, who comes out strongly on the side of dignity, propriety and other engaging virtues. One morning at four A.M. Mr. Paget phoned the senior partner of my firm, Mr. Claude Potter, and told him that his nephew, Wes Beattie, was in the cells charged with theft. There was a tremendous flap. Mr. Potter phoned me—I live hell and gone out in Port Credit—and said to come in and bail this kid out and try to hush up the scandal as much as possible. It seems that the kid lived with his granny, old Mrs. Charles Beattie, who had recently lost her husband and was in delicate health. The shock was likely to kill her, because Wes was, quote, the apple of her eye.

  “I found the kid in a frightful state. The police had been questioning him—no duress, force, violence or threats, of course. They said he got the bruise on his cheek when he fell downstairs. He’d been caught with the goods on him, so I said there were two things he could do. He could go in and plead guilty, or he could ask for a remand. But meanwhile Mr. Paget had joined me, and he said that a remand would give the papers a chance to get the story and blow it up. I felt that his fears were exaggerated. Wes tearfully tried to tell us some weird story which did not in the least resemble the first statements he had made to the police.

  “He said that some Englishman had called him at the bank where he worked, and had offered him a terrific job—as an executive trainee! The man said he represented an English company about to open up a Canadian subsidiary. He wanted Wes to come for an interview to his hotel and told him he would send his secretary to pick Wes up and drive him there. Wes got permission to leave the bank early; the secretary picked him up and drove him to the Midtown Motel, where she parked and walked with him to the rear entrance of the bar. Then she remembered she’d left her handbag in the car and sent Wes back to get it. He must have got confused and taken the wrong handbag from the wrong car, he said. And then, when they looked for the secretary in the bar, she wasn’t there. She vanished, he said, into thin air. Mr. Paget got quite angry. He said, ‘Wes, I’m sick of your silly lies. You simply get yourself all tangled up in them.’

  “Anyway, I talked to the man from the Crown Attorney’s office, and he said his witnesses would be in court, and one of them—the woman whose purse had been stolen—was from out of town—Sudbury, I believe. He would be only too happy to proceed, naturally. I met Mr. Potter and Mr. Paget and urged that we get a remand, in the hope that the witness wouldn’t show up two weeks later. But Mr. Paget said no, it would be terrible to have this disgrace hanging over the old lady—his mother-in-law, Wes’s grandmother. The papers might try to make something of a youth from a prominent family stealing from parked cars.

  “So, much to everyone’s surprise, the case was heard that morning. Wes pleaded Not Guilty, and tried to tell this silly story of his. The magistrate kept interrupting him, and then, on cross-examination, the prosecutor tore him to shreds. Why had Wes concealed the handbag under his coat? Because, Wes said, he felt silly carrying a woman’s purse.”

  “Which makes good sense,” Sidney said. “I dare you to carry a woman’s purse in that district. You’d be accosted!”

  There was much laughter.

  “True enough,” Bellwood said. “But the owner of the purse was there, she certainly identified her property, and she said that Wes had hung on to the bag even after she claimed it. Wes was asked why, if he was innocent, he had twice tried to break loose, and run away. He said he was frightened and confused. Under fire his features trembled and the tears flowed, and old Cartwright was disgusted. He said Wes was a disgrace to his entire background, et cetera, et cetera, and gave him two months.”

  “A very pretty mess,” Sidney Grant said. “And just what you can expect when you try to hush things up. Damn it, the woman had recovered her property. I’ll bet she never would have returned to give evidence if the thing had been remanded.”

  “I entirely agree with you, Gargoyle,” Bellwood said. “Fine,” Sidney Grant said. “But another thing occurs to me. Why, Dr. Heber, don’t you simply look this woman witness up, bring her to see Wes Beattie and convince him that she is not a member of a sinister gang? You could show him that his Uncle Edgar wouldn’t have had any trouble locating her an
d that there was no brain to warn his uncle to ‘lay off—or else.’ ”

  “My dear Mr.—er—Grant,” Dr. Heber said. “We have no interest whatever in exploding this fantasy of Wes’s. The moment we question his story he gets wildly hysterical and then withdraws, virtually into a catatonic trance. There is no communicating with him on any other terms than that his story is accepted. We are happy to let him live in this weird world of his.”

  “Well, how about his counsel in the murder trial—Baldwin Ogilvy? Isn’t he interested in checking this thing out?”

  “Well, no,” Dr. Heber said, and smiled. “Please be discreet about this, but Wes’s defense will simply be insanity. These delusions will save him from the gallows. The Crown will, I understand, accept the plea of insanity and that will be that.”

  “I would still like to talk to that woman witness,” Sidney Grant said. “Women keep vanishing into thin air. This is one who could be found.”

  “Then, if it will give you any satisfaction, Mr. Grant, I suggest that you find her and talk to her. Meanwhile, Wes sits in the Psychiatric Hospital on an attorney general’s remand warrant, living in his world of fantasy which he will probably never leave again. The reality is too horrible for his mind to contemplate.”

  “It’s a funny thing,” Sidney said. “Twice this man has gone through the same routine. ‘I was with a nice girl—her parents mustn’t know.’ Then ‘I was with a married woman who has a jealous husband.’ Finally ‘I was the victim of a vast conspiracy.’

  “That is the way Wes Beattie’s mind works,” Dr. Heber said. “He has a long history as a chronic liar.”

  “The boy who cried ‘Wolf’ too often,” Sidney said. “Well, sir, I am going to find that woman witness, the one whose handbag was stolen.”

  “Good for you,” the psychiatrist said. “And good luck.”

  Chapter Two

  The name and address of the woman witness were easy to find. The court office had the information, as well as the Crown Attorney’s office, and a stenographer had been sent to the police court from Jim Bellwood’s office to take down the proceedings against Wes verbatim, because the magistrates’ courts were not themselves equipped with court stenographers.

  All sources agreed that the woman whose handbag had been stolen was Mrs. Irene Leduc, of 428 Baylie Circle, Sudbury, Ontario.

  So Sidney Grant summoned his secretary, Miss Georgina Semple, an elderly woman with incredible red hair piled high on her head, and dictated a registered letter to Mrs. Leduc, stating simply that he had legal matters of a confidential nature to discuss with her.

  His letter was returned by the Sudbury post office, which stated that there was no such address.

  “Ha!” he said gleefully, and wrote to a lawyer friend in Sudbury asking him to check on the whole business. Was there any address like the one given, or was there a Mrs. Irene Leduc who had been a witness in the Toronto case?

  In due course a ribald reply came from the friend, saying that no such woman existed and advising Mr. Grant to be more careful in future when he picked up stray females in bars. Miss Semple, who had large brown eyes and a knowing air, could not suppress her amusement at the reply.

  Tracing the woman witness was not, after all, going to be simple routine.

  Sidney Grant took the first opportunity to visit the Midtown Motel and examine the register. According to Bellwood’s transcript, the woman witness had been a guest at the motel. The manager was inclined to be hostile. He didn’t like people, especially lawyers, nosing in his register—but the law was the law. And Sidney discovered that a Mr. and Mrs. G. Leduc, of Sudbury, Ontario, had booked in at the Midtown at 11 A.M. on Thursday, May 11, the day of the theft for which Wes Beattie had served two months in prison. He further learned that the Leducs had checked out at 8 P.M. on the same day.

  No doubt all the fuss about the theft had driven them to change hotels, Sidney decided. But, most important, he took down the license number of the Leducs’ car, which was noted on the registration card.

  Back at the office, he asked Miss Semple to check the car license with the Parliament buildings. It proved to be a black Dodge sedan, belonging to a car rental agency on Dundas Street in Toronto.

  “Now what do you make of that, Georgie dear?” Sidney asked Miss Semple.

  Miss Semple had spent most of her life in a large law office, from which she had been superannuated. A pillar of virtue herself, she was nevertheless knowing in the ways of the world.

  “What do I make of what?” she asked.

  “A woman, claiming to be Mrs. Leduc, of Sudbury, rents a car in Toronto, books a motel room at eleven A.M. and gives it up early the same evening.”

  “The afternoon is a lovely time of day, they say!” Miss Semple said archly.

  “This woman had her purse stolen in the motel car park. The thief was caught with the goods on him. Next day the woman, using this same name and address, went into court and gave evidence against the thief,” Sidney said.

  “Well, really!” Miss Semple said. “What some women won’t do! I suppose she is a local woman who rented the car and went to this motel with her boyfriend. She rented the car because she knows that motels take down license numbers, and she wanted to pretend she was from out of town. Her husband probably thought she was shopping at Simpson’s.”

  “That’s the way it looks,” Sidney said. “But if this is a false name, why would she take a chance and appear in court if she didn’t have to? She had recovered her property, after all.”

  “Immoral women can be terrible prudes,” Miss Semple asserted. “I mean I knew a notoriously wanton female who was shocked if anybody used a bad word. A woman might take a high-and-mighty moral attitude to a sneak thief at the very moment she was being flagrantly unfaithful to her husband.”

  “I suppose so,” Sidney said. “But I would certainly love to talk to this woman. In fact, I made a boast that I would. However, she seems to have made herself pretty scarce.”

  “Why don’t you check with the car rental people?” Miss Semple said. “They might have a lead.”

  “By golly, I will,” Sidney said. “First free minute I get.” Sidney Grant did not have many free minutes. He spent a great deal of time in the lower courts, working for small fees, and office work filled the rest of his time. He could not even afford the modest luxury of an articled law student.

  But nevertheless he managed to get around, being active and wiry, and in due course he got around to the car rental agency, where the manager was proud to show off his record system.

  “When we rent a car,” he told Sidney, “we open one of these dockets. See? A manila envelope. On the outside we write the details of the vehicle and the renter. Like time of rental, mileage out, mileage in, name, address and driver’s license number of the renter. So you tell me the date and all, and maybe I can turn up this rental you’re interested in.”

  “Mrs. Irene Leduc,” Sidney said. “Sometime about May tenth or eleventh.”

  The man disappeared and returned after a short delay with one of the dockets.

  “Got it right here,” he said. “Now, this vehicle was a black Dodge, and we booked it out at ten A.M. Mrs. Irene Leduc, Sudbury, Ontario. She drove it—holy cow!—she only drove it six point four miles. Boy, it would be a lot cheaper to take taxis! And she brought it back seven P.M. Now here’s her driver’s license number. You want that? Not checkin’ up on the little woman, I hope?”

  “Eh?” Sidney said.

  “Your wife isn’t givin’ you trouble, I hope,” the man said.

  “Definitely not,” Sidney said. “She doesn’t get the chance. I am a devout bachelor. What is there inside the envelope?”

  “Well, there won’t be anything,” the man said. “See, like when the renter buys gas and oil, they pay cash and get a receipt, and we file the receipts in here. Like we refund the money they pay out. And parking tickets or speeding tickets that they hand in—we file them here too, although a lot of creeps just tear their parking
tickets up and throw ’em away.”

  “So there’s nothing in this envelope?”

  “Well, she’d hardly buy any gas, see? Hold it, though—she did!”

  He fished a flimsy receipted bill from the envelope.

  “Nope. She had trouble. Fuel pump repairs, a buck fifty, which between you and I is highway robbery. Maybe that’s why she brought the car back.”

  The bill said “Mac’s Garage” and was receipted “R. Phelan.”

  Sidney Grant wrote the details in his notebook, thanked the man for his trouble and returned to the office. “I think we may have a line on the elusive Irma La Douce or Irene Leduc,” he told Miss Semple. “Just check this driver’s license number out with the Parliament buildings, will you?”

  Miss Semple was back in the inner sanctum within three minutes, and she laid a slip of paper in front of her employer. It said: “Mrs. Irene Ledley, 28 Bayview Circle, Toronto.”

  “Well I’m blowed,” Sidney said, and pulled his own driver’s license out of his wallet. “Do you suppose she just flashed the license and gave a wrong address, or do you think she actually cooked the license?”

  “Very easy to cook it,” Miss Semple said. “Look—she could type a four in front of the twenty-eight to make fourtwo-eight, and she could alter ‘Bayview’ to Baylie by changing a couple of letters.”

  “I suppose,” Sidney said, “you could erase Toronto and type in Sudbury—both seven letters.”

  “And you could sign Irene Leduc to make it look like Irene Ledley,” she said. “I suppose Mrs. Ledley was having an affair, and she wanted to cover her tracks.”

  “And then appear in court under her false name,” Sidney said. “Tomorrow I am going to visit Bayview Circle. I don’t want to phone, but I’d like to catch her when her husband is at the office. Unless I’m wrong, she’ll be so scared that she’ll tell us anything we want to know.”