The Case of the Backward Mule

by Erle Stanley Gardner

  “Cynthia!” he exclaimed under his breath, and jumped to the running-board, slid into the seat beside her, and pulled the door shut. “What in the world are you doing here?”

  She instantly switched on the lights, slammed home the gear shift and eased her foot back on the clutch pedal. The windscreen-wiper fought back fog-bred moisture. “Waiting for you,” she said. “And I’ve been there so long I’m chilled to the bone. I thought you would never come out.”

  “Why didn’t you send a message? Why didn’t you telephone?”

  “I was afraid to. I thought the police would have your line tapped. I was waiting where I could see you at the boat. I saw them pounce on you, and I was afraid. I ran away.”

  “How did you find my flat?”

  “Through Yat T’oy, of course. I’d been up there several times, helping him arrange things. And then … this …”

  Clane placed his hand on her shoulder. “Take it easy, Cynthia.”

  She said “Look, Owl, I can’t drive and talk. I’m going to swing around on a side street some place where we can park. We have lots to talk about, and I want to be where I can look at you without being guilty of what the speed cops have insisted is negligent driving.”

  “I’m on my way to meet someone, Cynthia. It may be rather important.”

  “Oh, bother that someone. You haven’t anything in your whole life that’s half as important as this, Terry.”

  Abruptly she concentrated her attention entirely on driving the car. Clane felt the same thrill he had always felt when riding with her, the deft sure touch of her hand on the wheel, the daring abandon with which she slammed down the throttle to the floorboards and zipped through traffic. Now she made time through the deserted streets.

  “Don’t be picked up for speeding,” Clane cautioned. “It might be embarrassing.”

  “I’m watching my rear-view mirror and the side streets,” she said. “Here’s a good place where we can talk.”

  She swung the car in an abrupt turn and almost in the same motion selected a parking place near the kerb, guided the car adroitly to its berth between painted white lines, switched off the ignition and headlights, squirmed out from behind the steering-wheel, swung to face him and raised her lips.

  Clane put his arms around her, felt once more the oft-remembered warmth of her body, the fragrance of her hair. Her lips, warm and eager, were hot on his and her arms twined around his neck, strained him to her.

  “Terry,” she breathed after a moment, and as she turned her cheek, Clane felt the moisture of her tears.

  “Cynthia, You’re crying.”

  “You’re damn right, I’m crying,” she said. “My gosh, I thought you’d never get here.”

  “Cynthia, whatever possessed you to do it?”

  “What?”

  “Arrange Harold’s escape.”

  She was silent for several seconds, then she said suddenly “Let’s talk about it in order, Owl.”

  “Where do we begin?”

  She said firmly “We begin with when you went away and were so damn noble that you wouldn’t marry me before you went.”

  “I couldn’t have taken you with me, Cynthia, and the chances were twenty to one that I’d never come back. I wanted you to be free and …”

  “Oh, I know all about that,” she said impatiently. “You made it plain enough when you left.”

  “And,” Clane went on, keeping his eyes on the fog-shrouded pavement, “it turned out that I was right. You became interested in Edward Harold.”

  For a long time she said nothing. Clane, looking out through the window, suddenly realized that she would say nothing until he had turned to meet her eyes. He swung his head. She was looking at him, and there was enough light from the ornamental street lights to show the tears glistening on her cheeks.

  “And now,” Clane went on, “You’ve done something that was typically Cynthia. You’ve done the impulsive thing, the thing that takes everyone by surprise. Who were your accomplices, Cynthia?”

  She said somewhat angrily “Is that all you have to ask?”

  “What else could there be?” he asked in surprise.

  “Nothing,” she said sharply, and wriggled back behind the steering-wheel.

  “I’ve gone over the newspaper accounts of the case,” Clane said. “When you stop to analyse the evidence that connected Harold with the murder, it was all circumstantial evidence and not what you would call a robust case. The thing that brought about Harold’s conviction was the way he told his story, his denial that he had gone back to see Farnsworth.”

  “Perhaps he didn’t go back,” she said with fierce loyalty to the absent friend.

  “The evidence doesn’t indicate it.”

  “Oh, hang the evidence! People have been mistaken on identifications before.”

  “Not this time, I’m afraid, Cynthia.”

  She said abruptly, angrily “All right, you have an appointment. I’ll drive you to where you want to go.”

  “Cynthia,” he said, “we’ve got to straighten this out. I want to know where Harold is.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he has to give himself up.”

  “Give himself up to be executed,” she said. “He’d rather die first and I’d rather have him. It’s better to be out in the open, shooting it out with a bunch of cops and going down with a chestful of bullets, than to be dragged out of a cell like a cur being hauled out of a cage, placed in an airtight execution-room and have people leering at you through windows while you listen to the hissing of the cyanide tablets dropping into the acid and forming the gas that you’ll presently inhale. And all the time those leering eyes of the morbidly curious, looking at you through the glass slits. You, chained to a chair, surrounded by this ring of curious eyes that can’t even give you enough privacy to meet your end decently. To hell with it! Edward would rather hole up in a building somewhere and shoot it out with the cops, and I don’t blame him.”

  “There’s yourself to be considered,” he said gently.

  “And I don’t count either,” she said. “The trouble is with you. You’re so damn right.”

  “You don’t act like it now.”

  “I’m not talking about now. I’m talking about when you went to the Orient. I was happy-go-lucky and impulsive, and everything in life seemed a joke. And you told me that I couldn’t live life that way, that life was serious, that it would get me down in the long run. Damn it, You’re right! But I’m not going to yield to life without a struggle. I’ll fight it all the way. I hate being logical and careful and safe and conservative and cautious and conventional. I hate the whole damn business. Do you hear me, Owl?”

  “Life doesn’t care particularly whether you hate it or not,” Clane said. “Life exerts a steady pressure. You learn that causes build effects, which in turn become causes until you have a wheel.”

  “Not that, Owl. I won’t let life get away with all that. Why not just laugh at life and throw out your chips? It’s a gamble anyway. I mink you develop as much character by gambling as you do by the patient, slow, plodding, mathematical way of trying to live life. Life isn’t anything that can be hoarded. It’s a force. It’s something You’re spending even when You’re trying to save it. You … you might just as well go along with it.”

  “But,” Clane pointed out, “you were trying to tell me that I had been right and that life had got you down.”

  “On account of … on account of you, Terry Clane.”

  “In what way?”

  “When you went away, my life was … All right, we won’t talk about it. You want to talk about the murder case. You want to talk about the circumstantial evidence and all that. Go ahead.”

  “The point is,” Clane explained patiently, “the Supreme Court will review the case and consider that it was a case of purely circumstantial evidence, that the jury were probably unduly prejudiced by Harold’s manner on the stand and his clumsy attempt at denying that he had returned to Farnsworth’s house.” />
  “So what?”

  “So they’re apt to set aside the conviction and give him a new trial.”

  “All right. Let them do it.”

  “But the point is,” Clane said, “that under the law a defendant has no right to press an appeal unless he is abiding by the law. If he has escaped and is holding himself in defiance of the law, he loses the benefit of it. He can’t carry an appeal to the Supreme Court while he is a fugitive from justice. The district attorney is planning to go into court tomorrow morning and move for a dismissal of the appeal. You know what that will mean. Once the appeal is dismissed, all hope is gone. When Edward Harold is captured, he’ll be sent directly to the death-house—only the intervention of the governor can save him. And It’s hardly possible that the governor will exert himself to save the life of a man who has escaped from the custody of officers at the point of a gun.”

  “I tell you, they won’t ever take Edward alive.”

  “All right,” Clane said. “What I want is for Edward Harold to surrender.”

  “Never.”

  “I want him to walk into jail and give himself up, and I want to go ahead and work on that case. I want to help with the appeal. I want to try and unearth some new evidence.”

  “Edward doesn’t intend to give himself up.”

  Clane went on patiently “We have to be very careful. We’ve got to arrange dungs so that It’s done dramatically and spectacularly. We must smuggle him right up to the doors of the jail so that he can walk up and surrender. Or else go to one of the newspaper offices and surrender to the newspaper. But you can see what will happen if he can’t do one of these things cleverly enough. If some officer catches him while he’s on his way to the jail to surrender himself, no amount of protestation on the part of Harold that he was going to give himself up would be of any avail. The officer will pull the old publicity stuff. Newspaper reporters who like to keep in good with the officers will dish out the usual tripe that while Patrolman John Doe was walking to the bus line after his shift on duty he kept his eye on passing pedestrians, mentally checking off each face against the wanted list, which he studied daily, a practice which he had diligently followed for some twenty years. And last night it paid off in a big way because among the hurrying pedestrians John Doe found the face of the one man whom police were seeking more diligently than …”

  “Owl, stop it,” she commanded.

  “You see what I mean, Cynthia. He has to surrender. It has to be accomplished in such a manner that …”

  “I tell you he isn’t going to surrender. He’ll never surrender. He prefers to the fighting. The mockery of it all! The judge forcing the prisoner to stand up, going through all that rigmarole of asking him if he has anything to say why sentence should not be pronounced, and telling him that he’s going to the. I hate it. I hate the damn hypocrisy of it—the smug lawyers, careful to keep their faces turned at just the right angle so that when the photographers shoot pictures of the courtroom scene, that’ll get Mr District Attorney and Mr Attorney-for-the-De-fence in a properly impressive pose. I tell you, Owl, he’ll never give himself up. Never, never, never.”

  “And then of course there’s your own position in the matter to be considered.”

  “Got to be considered,” she said.

  “What sort of a chap is Edward Harold?” Clane asked.

  “He’s a man who rights against injustices,” she said. “he’s always sympathized with the underdog, always tried to do what he could for the man who was down. And it makes him furious whenever he hears of cases of oppression. He loves life. He loves liberty. He says that the one thing he asks of life is freedom of choice. And imagine a man like that in a scrape like this.”

  “You love him very, very much?” Clane asked.

  She abruptly snapped on the ignition.

  “Where’s your appointment?” she asked.

  “Don’t bother to drive me mere. Take me to where I can get a cab.”

  “No, I’ll take you there.”

  She had taken off the emergency brake and was easing the car into motion as Clane gave her the address.

  Abruptly her foot slammed down the brake pedal. She turned to him as though he had struck her. “Terry, what are you doing?”

  “Giving you the address of the place I want to go.”

  “What are you trying to do? Are you playing with me as a cat plays with a mouse, doing that old stunt of yours of reading people’s minds …”

  “Take it easy, Cynthia. What”s all the commotion about? I simply am going to this address to meet George Gloster. I think It’s a warehouse of the Eastern Art Import and Trading Company.”

  “And George Gloster is going to meet you there?”

  “Yes.”

  She released her foot from the brake, slammed the car into gear, shot out into the middle of the street, took the corner in second, slapped the gear-shift lever back into high as she straightened out on the boulevard.

  “We’re not going to a fire,” Clane said.

  Her lips were pressed together in a firm, straight line. “That’s what you may think,” she said.

  “What,” Clane asked, “is the idea?”

  She flung words at him over her shoulder, her eyes watching the fog-shrouded street intersections as the car went screaming by. “Edward Harold,” she said, “has been concealed in the Eastern Art Import and Trading Company’s warehouse. You can see what will happen if George Gloster goes there. How long has he been there?”

  “I don’t know. He telephoned me to meet him there just before I left the apartment and …”

  “You don’t know whether he was there then or just going there?”

  “No.”

  Cynthia choked back something which could have been a sob. “And all the time we’ve been talking,” she said, “Edward Harold has been there and …” She didn’t finish the sentence.

  She didn’t need to.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE WAREHOUSE WAS DARK, a gloomy, forbidding building which fronted on a narrow street near the waterfront. Down here the fog had settled until the headlights of Cynthia”s car seemed boring through a tunnel of watered milk.

  Cynthia swung the car into the narrow side street, braked it to a stop, pushed open the door on her side and was out almost before Clane had his door open.

  She didn’t wait for him but started running towards the entrance to the warehouse.

  “Take it easy, Cynthia,” Clane cautioned, moving along be-hind her with long, swinging strides. “Let”s try and find out first what …”

  His words were wasted. She was running.

  Clane’s hand, dropping to the right-hand coat pocket, found the automatic which Yat T’oy had so thoughtfully put there. His left hand encountered a small pocket electric torch.

  The entrance of the building was shrouded in darkness, but the beam of Clane’s tiny torch showed that the door was slightly ajar and through the swirling, thick fog he could dimly make out the bulk of a motor-car parked at an angle, pulled up off the road and across the pavement, a motor-car which seemed comfortably ensconced off the right of way and on private property, as though it were resting in a familiar parking place.

  Clane called through the crack in the doorway. “Hello in there. Is anyone home? This is Terry Clane, Gloster. You there?”

  There was no answer, no sound save water dripping from the eaves of the building.

  Cynthia, heedless of Terry Clane’s warning, pushed open the door, groped for a light switch. Terry Clane’s torch furnished an illumination which enabled her to locate the switch. She clicked it on and lights disclosed the interior of the warehouse.

  It was a small one-storey warehouse. The front part contained a room which could be used as an office, and behind this was the warehouse proper. Here were tiers of packed cases wrapped with braided strips of flexible bamboo bearing Chinese characters and the stencilled label “Eastern Art Import and Trading Company, San Francisco, USA”. There was about the place the pecu
liar mingling of the musty smell of a warehouse with the smell of the Orient.

  Terry Clane walked to the doorway of the office while Cynthia walked out towards the back of the warehouse, and his eyes, trained to take in details, photographed upon his mind the things which he saw.

  The office had been cut off from the rest of the warehouse building by a partition, and occupied the entire east side of the building. The warehouse door was on the north. Opening it, one entered the main warehouse. A few feet farther on and to the left was a door which opened into the partition dividing the warehouse and the office. In the south-east corner of that office room was a wall telephone. On the south side of the room, moved out a few feet from the wall, was a table. Three or four chairs were scattered about the place. In the centre of the room was another small table covered with old magazines. On the north-west side of the room and directly behind the door from the warehouse was a wash-room, the door standing open. It contained a wash-bowl and a toilet. Behind that and in the north-east corner of the room was an army cot, a folding canvas affair, on which were several army blankets. Another blanket had been folded over so as to serve as a hard makeshift pillow. On the floor were canned goods piled against the wall so that the labels were plainly visible—soups, fruit juices, canned beans, canned meat, vegetables, canned milk and a big glass jar of coffee. A big waste-basket was partially filled with empty tins. Over on the table at the south end of the room was a portable electric plate, a small aluminium frying-pan, some knives and forks, a can-opener, a cup and saucer, and a coffee-pot.

  Clane took another step, then came to a startled halt.

  Just to the east of the table, lying so that the feet were pointed towards the door to the warehouse and the head towards the south-east corner of the room, was the body of a man, lying face down. And from that body a pool of thick blood seeped slowly in an ever-widening circle.

  “Cynthia,” he called over his shoulder, “this way, quick. Don’t touch anything.”

  He kept his eyes busy while he waited for her to join him.

  The tall oblong windows in the office were so covered with dust and cobwebs as to make it almost impossible to see out of them. They were all closed with the exception of a window in the south-east corner, which was raised wide open and through which the damp, fog-filled atmosphere penetrated into the room, giving the place a dank, clammy chill.