The Case of the Lavender Gripsack

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  Judge Penworth raised a weary hand. “Of course this Court,” he declared, “can’t stand waiting while you and your client indulge in a lot of recriminations against each other—but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t consult a few min­utes together about the angle your final address to me shall take. So—” He gazed around his left shoulder at the big grandfather’s clock, whose hands now stood at 2:16 in the morning, then at the conveniently empty corner which stood far to the left of his own left shoulder, to the left of the dejected sitting defendant, well back of the Misses Swarth­mars’ table.

  “You and Doe may consult for up to—well—no more than nine minutes in yonder corner,” he said. “Till 2:25, in short, by the clock back of my shoulder here.” He nodded curtly toward the blue-clad police officer squatting on the low tabourette at the hack of the slightly raised witness box. “Officer, since Inspector Scott has the key to the one door of this room in his possession, you can, I guess, unlock the defendant from your own person. No, unlock just your own handcuff—and leave his—and the chain—still on him.” Penworth turned toward the courtroom. “There will be a semi-recess, but not a regular recess,” he qualified, “pending the defense attorney and her client having a brief consultation prior to final address to the Bench. All persons may talk—but, on account of the limited size of this roam, and the large number of persons assembled here, any who leave their seats will be judged guilty of contempt of court, and fined $25 each.” He fixed his gaze on the newspapermen. “And—in advance, gentlemen—no requests will be granted by the Bench for use of the phone to telephone in copy to your papers, as I can’t favor one of you against the others. Anyway, your respective deadlines all lie practically an hour and a half hence—and besides, the Near-South Exchange of the Phone Company is only a half block in back of us here—yes, on Wabash—where, when this trial is over, you can all get a half dozen wires apiece if you require them. All right, Mr. Mullins.”

  “Semi-recess!” called Mullins loudly, rapping sharply on his deal table with his wooden gavel. “Talking permitted—but no leaving of seats.”

  A terrific buzz of conversation broke forth so instan­taneously that it seemed as though the gavel blow had been but a trigger releasing it. The while the reddish-haired John Doe, who had been freed in the meanwhile from the florid-faced, blue-coated Mullarky—by the latter’s removal of the padlock from his own wrist—gathered up in one hand the chain still attached to himself, and stepped stiffly down and over towards the corner Judge Penworth had indicated. And while Elsa also made her way quickly around the lawyers’ table and to that same corner where she planted herself firmly—her back snugly in its very angle—and beckoned him closer. And closer he came. Looking down at her and over­shadowing her completely, a full red-head shorter as she was! And thus she made the movements of both of their lips invisible to any or all persons in that room—his back completely cutting off his own, and his well-built frame blotting out her small self at all margins. And to speak to him she had to raise her voice markedly against the lively buzz far behind him. But raise it she did!

  CHAPTER XVI

  Meccano!

  “I thought I had a lot to say to you,” Elsa began bitterly, “but I guess, after all, I spilled it all out back there—before the Press and—and everybody. So there’s nothing much to be added. Except to say that in trying to save your own skin tonight you’ve made an awful fool of me, and—”

  “I am sorry about that,” he said. “It’s my skin, of course—and—and I’ve a right to try to save it. Still, I don’t like for you to get hurt. Not in—in the tiniest manner. Because, after all, as I think I as good as said this afternoon, I love you, and—”

  “Love me!” she retorted. “My God! Well, all I can say is that this is sure one hell of a time to be telling women you love ’em, and—”

  “No it isn’t,” he contradicted. “Not for a guy like me—facing the chair or life—”

  “The chair,” she corrected. “But go on.”

  “All right, then,” he assented, somewhat desperately, “the chair then. But I still say this is the time for me to say—what I want to say. Before I’m a convicted felon—and while you’re just a poor struggling girl lawyer with nary a cent to your name—and no prospects of same for years. If all this had happened ten years from today, I wouldn’t be able to say anything—for you’d have a practice then, and a good income—and—well, my saying anything would be out. But tonight I can speak. And—and will, by God! Chair or no chair. You’re the little girl I’ve been looking for all my fool life. I knew it the minute you came tripping into my cell today. And I’ve known it more and more ever since—every time those little pert little lips of yours opened in my defense.

  “And every time I scratched my freckled nose?” she added sardonically. “Go on.”

  “Yes, even when you scratched your cute nose. Yes! And—”

  “And—” she put in, “while the precious minutes roll by—nine I think we’ve got—you waste your time telling me you love me?”

  “Yes, and—”

  “All right. Now I’ll tell one! Just now you declared how you were emboldened to speak—because I was poor and pen­niless and struggling and all that. Well—I’m none of those things. At least this very minute I’m—I’m owner of a nine-tenths share in Colby’s Nugget. And my share, minus a small lien against it, is worth $100,000 net. And will be worth even more than that when it comes to me in exactly four years. Except—” She tossed up her hands in a helpless gesture. “Except that thanks to you, John, taking me for a nice galloping ride, I’ve lost it all. Will have, at least, when Mr. Mullins there raps, in twenty minutes or so, that the trial is over—and court is adjourned.”

  John Doe had been staring at her open-mouthed while she spoke. She couldn’t help but note what fine white teeth he had.

  “My God!” he said. “I am flabbergasted.” And across his forehead he bewilderedly passed the back of the hand which held the gathered-up chain, the clinking of which seemed to shake him partly out of his dumbfounded state. “Well, be­lieve you me, girl, if I’d dreamed just now you were worth a hundred grand, I’d never—”

  “—have said you love me, eh? Well, cheer up!” Elsa’s voice dripped with bitter irony. “I’m losing it all—thanks to you. So your proposal—or whatever it was—”

  “My God!” he said again. “And you smart and bright and—and pretty as hell—so you’re the damn little fool who signed a quitclaim on her own property—”

  “Yes,” she said with a sigh, glad that the buzz of conversation back of them was like a curtain cutting them off in their lone corner, “I’m the damn little fool! Less smart when I did it than I am tonight—less bright, too—not less pretty, since there’s nothing less than zero. And thanks to another damn fool, who thought he could hornswoggle an ultra-legal criminal judge with a chunk of blithering romance into letting him walk out free—well, the damn little fool loses her $100,000 nugget. By God, I—I should have done what I first actually thought of doing when your case was shoved down my throat, I—I should have shot myself in the leg and gone to the hospital. That is what I should have done.”

  He looked exceedingly crestfallen.

  “And now my—my catching the chair—means—”

  “—that that ‘old buzzard,’” she told him quietly, “as you termed him tonight, with the world’s ‘coldest eye,’ sitting back there in that back row—yes, the one fondling a black cotton umbrella—the witness who tentatively identified you tonight as at least strongly resembling a man who accosted him near the murder scene last night—well, he’s my dear half-uncle who will get sole title to Colby’s Nugget by virtue of Judge Penworth’s decision there.”

  “Gosh!” he said, scratching his head, “this is bad all right. For—for both of us. Your losing your title. And me getting the chair; for it’s easy to see Penworth’s out to give me the latter. To be frank, all I’ve be
en hoping for for myself in the last five minutes is that you might be able, in some kind of final address, to persuade His Honor to boil the sentence down to—”

  “Some kind of final address!” Elsa repeated. “John Doe,” she said quietly, “the address has never yet been written—much less delivered—that could avert the chair for you. For there isn’t a point to educe in your favor. And—see here, John, you say you love me, and—”

  “I do,” he replied gruffly. “And I’m sorry I just now called you a damn little fool. Why—that pious-looking white-faced buzzard in the back row there could hornswoggle anybody who wasn’t a real-estate shark. Anyway, I do love you. Though it’s no compliment to you, coming from me—a guy headed straight for 2,200 volts and—”

  “Well,” she replied, unbending just a little, “it’s always a compliment to a woman to be told she’s loved—’specially when she has ugly red hair and uglier freckles—and ’specially when the man who tells it to her thinks she’s penniless and a nobody. Both of which she now is in this case, anyway, and—but the point is—See here, John, answer me one question truthfully. I’ll carry through the best I can; but I want to know the truth. Was it you or was it someone else who did the actual job in Lou Vann’s office last night?”

  “Somebody else, of course.”

  “Of course—is good. But you’re innocent, then, of that murder?”

  “Certainly.”

  “But why did you come to that criminal ‘meet’ then? With Wah Lee’s skull?”

  “But it isn’t Wah Lee’s skull! It’s as I told you all tonight—the skull of a blond Swede gigolo known as ‘Blinky.’”

  “But my God A’mighty, John, that story has been exploded skyhigh!”

  “That story—yes! But listen, did you ever, when you were a kid, put together the locksticks of a Meccano outfit into a—a bridge; then bust it up; and take all the sticks, and with ’em make a locomot—”

  “Unfortunately,” said Elsa dignifiedly, “I was a girl kid; so—”

  “Oh yes—of course. I hadn’t thought of that. You played with dolls. Dolls with red hair, I’ll bet! And—”

  “In merciful Heaven’s name,” Elsa almost screamed, “pro­ceed on what you started out on. The Meccano outfit! Well, are you trying to imply that one lockstick, at least, in that complicated structure you built here tonight is real?”

  “One? Why—calling every real person I named here tonight a ‘stick’—all the sticks are real! And I was, last night, right where I said I was—in Mortimer King’s library in Minneapolis. In short, Elsa, all the sticks I used on the wit­ness stand tonight are, in actuality, combined into another and different pattern entirely.”

  She regarded him helplessly.

  “And speaking of objects—as well as persons—am I to presume that the skull-stick is real too?”

  “Absolutely! It’s the skull of one ‘Blinky,’ I tell you, a handsome blond Swede gigolo.”

  She regarded him as helplessly as she had before. “Well, exactly why, then,” she inquired sternly, “did you present all these six persons—and particularly this most salient of all your ‘Meccano’ sticks—this skull—in the untrue and in­correct relationship in which you did tonight?”

  “Why?” he repeated, and regarded her grimly. “Because, Elsa,” he said quietly, “had I presented them in the true pattern in which they actually lie—it would absolutely and unequivocally have meant the chair!”

  “Would have meant the chair is good!” was Elsa’s quick reply. “Hell, John, you got the chair! You—” She broke off, her voice tempered. For he was, plainly, a crushed and beaten man. “In what way, John,” she asked more gently, “would it have been impossible to have presented the events of your story in their true relationship? Maybe yet we can—”

  He shook his head grimly. “Not a chance! Especially since Mortimer King laid his cards atop the table tonight, and refused to take the beautiful bribe I laid at his feet.” His face was long. “Elsa, I gambled today—and tonight—on what I thought was a most brilliant move—I suppose a man’s a fool for not trusting his attorney—but anyway, I lost.”

  “What was this brilliant move? Speak up, man—and fast. And a bit lower—both of us—for the conversational buzz out there isn’t so loud as it was.”

  “I will, Elsa,” he replied, lowering his own voice appreciably to conform to her lowered tone. “Elsa, I was exactly as I said here tonight—in King’s library in Minne­apolis last night. I went there—”

  “To steal—of course.” Elsa did not know whether she was being skeptically ironic—or merely curt.

  “No—not to steal. To pick up something. Something free—to anybody who had the guts to pick it up. You see, Elsa, I was broke. A drifter, I am—by name still ‘Doe’—but not a lousy sneak thief. And I got in by a window. And I went there believing that if one could only listen in, for an entire evening, on the telephone calls made by a dirty crook like Mortimer King, the name of some horse that was fixed to win—or damn near fixed to win—could assuredly be picked up.”

  “And where,” she demanded fixedly, “where were you going to get the wherewithal to be on this ‘fixed’ horse—if you were broke?”

  “Oh, that? Well, I worked out a quite moral manner to solve that. For as I say, Elsa, I’m not a lousy thief—as I made myself out to be tonight on the witness stand. You see, I was going to filch something out of King’s house before leaving, pawn it, bet on the ‘fixed’ horse—and, after my win, mail him back the pawn ticket, a postal order for the redemption—and many thanks. But in case, however, his unwitting ‘tip’ was no good, I would only send him the pawn ticket—as would be merited by him if he passed out false info!”

  Elsa passed a hand wearily over her brow. The morality of that scheme made her downright dizzy. “Well, why couldn’t you tell that on the stand?” she demanded. “If you could substantiate at all you were in King’s home—”

  “Wait. I can—yet I can’t. I was there, however, as I say. Kng came in. Late. Oh, about eleven o’clock. I was in the closet I described in my story tonight. It was filled with Mrs. King’s dresses—and I knew there wasn’t a chance in the world of his ever rubbering inside. The door was partly ajar. I could hear everything. Even see—what I wanted to. And for a full hour, Elsa, I sat in there listening to that man talking.”

  “Talking? To whom? Who else was with him? Steenburg?”

  “Steenburg? No! Nobody was with him! Everything I put in my story tonight I got, Elsa, from overhearing a long conversation King was holding with one of his bookie henchmen. He—but here’s the main point, Elsa. He’d—yes, King—had just come in off a bookie killing—”

  “A—a bookie killing?”

  “Yes. Why, when he came in he had blood all over one wrist. And his shirt was torn open at the front. And he had dried mud spattered on his face. Right in my view—from the interior of the closer, that is—he transferred a big rod from his coat pocket to his desk, but carefully ejected a couple of empty shells and refilled the gun with new bullets before he did so. But the conversation on the phone clinched it. It was easy—damned easy, Elsa—to read between the lines of what he was saying on the phone. For he was talking to one of the guys who had been on the one-way ride with him. Had been, apparently, the fingerman or something. Anyway, King and some cronies had, quite obviously, put out of the way some bet-runner—ex-bookie, I’m certain he was—who they were sure was going to turn State’s evidence at that forthcoming Senatorial investigation, and show all the rottenness in race gambling and book-making—as practiced at least by the King of Minny!—and probably, through that single bit of testi­mony, cause Federal enactments against every form of book-making in America. Which would be the death blow to book-making. You know? Stiff five and ten year sentences—for any bookmaker or odds runner or even odds taker caught in connection with a race book? Anyway, Elsa, it was plain they’d killed off t
his fellow—and that very night. And that, moreover, he is—or was—somebody whose absence can’t be discovered for months; not supposed to be in America, or something. And he has no people, Anyway, it sounded to me like it was a safe clean wipe-out—for them—if you get my idea.”

  He paused, then went hurriedly on:

  “Well, Elsa, you can imagine what chance I had to put up Mortimer King—murderer—and his phone conversation—tonight, to prove myself in the clear! Why—if he were to confirm such a story, he’d go to the chair—instead of me. There would be only one outcome, I saw today, if I put him on the stand in the actual manner in which he figured; for he’d perjure my life to save his own.”

  “But why—why,” Elsa asked helplessly, “did you tell the story that you did tell—in which you introduced those other extraneous real persons—four in number? I refer to Henry Speevy, the farmer—Otto Schaartze, the absent servant—Rozalda Mardzienski, the same—and Dr. Sciecinskiwicz?”