The Case of the Lonely Heiress

by Erle Stanley Gardner

  “Oh!” Marilyn said, and the word was an exclamation of dismay.

  “Go ahead,” Mason said. “What happened after that?”

  “Lieutenant Tragg, it seems, was delayed, and I was sent up to meet Sergeant Holcomb and three or four other officers.”

  Mason said, “And then, I suppose Sergeant Holcomb started questioning you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And,” Mason went on, “they put you in a chair with a bright light beating on your face. They formed a circle around you and a lot of other people came in, and they started yelling at you and throwing questions at you before you had a chance to answer, making all kinds of nasty insinuations and accusations and …”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And then Lieutenant Tragg suddenly showed up and was very fatherly and gentlemanly and apologetic and took you into his office, and the relief was so great that you felt he was the most wonderful gentleman.”

  “Why, yes! How did you know what happened?”

  Mason said, “It’s police routine, just part of the psychological third-degree. One man pounds a witness until she’s almost crazy, gets everything he can out of her, and then when she gets to the point where she won’t talk, a signal is flashed and another man comes in and takes the part of a perfect gentleman and …”

  “You mean that was all an act?”

  “All an act.”

  “Why, I don’t believe that Lieutenant Tragg is that sort.”

  “Lieutenant Tragg,” Mason said, “has a job to do. He’s given instructions as to the methods he has to employ. He doesn’t have a thing to say about what he does and what he doesn’t do. He’s a cog in a machine. The police have to get results. They have to make people talk. They use all sorts of methods. Some of them are damned ingenious. Don’t make the mistake of thinking the police are dumb.”

  “Well, those first people certainly were dumb. They …”

  “I’ll bet they got a lot out of you, at that.”

  “They didn’t until that witness identified me.”

  “What witness?”

  “The woman who saw us all going in and going out of Rose Keeling’s flat.”

  Mason said wearily, “Nine chances out of ten that was another police frameup. The witness was just a stooge. You didn’t see her clearly?”

  “No.”

  “Did she definitely state what time you came in? And what time you went out?”

  Marilyn Marlow thought for a moment, then said, “No, she didn’t. She just said that I was the woman she had seen leaving at the time she had previously told the police.”

  Mason sighed. “That’s an old gag. She hasn’t seen anyone. She was probably a stenographer in one of the police departments, working nights, or else she was a deputy clerk from the bail-bond office. She didn’t even know where Rose lived. She’d never seen you before in her life.”

  Marilyn Marlow sucked in her breath.

  “And what did you tell them?” Mason asked.

  She said, “I guess—I guess that did it! I thought she had seen us all going in and coming out, and I—I was trying to save you and I told them that I had been the one who had telephoned you to come and …”

  “And admitted you were there and left the place?”

  “Yes.”

  “That clinches things,” Mason said. “They’ll charge you with murder.”

  “And when that happens, what will it do to you?”

  Mason said grimly, “Plenty!”

  14

  Della Street was waiting up when Mason unlocked the door to the private office.

  She jumped up out of the chair and ran to him.

  “Della, what are you doing here?” Mason said. “It’s midnight.”

  “I know, but I couldn’t have slept if I’d gone home. What happened?”

  “They made her talk.”

  “How bad was it?”

  Mason hung his hat on a hook in the coat closet and said, “It’s a mess.”

  “Was the habeas corpus in time to do any good?”

  “Just in time to salvage some of it. But a lot of it had gone by the board.”

  “How much?”

  Mason said, “They worked the old gag on her. First, Sergeant Holcomb batted her around and then Tragg came in and was the perfect gentlemen. He’s good at that. People feel his heart’s in the right place and sob out their souls to him.”

  “What did she tell him?”

  “Told him about the letter, about telephoning me, and, by implication, told them that I had either wiped fingerprints off the receiver of the telephone or had given her a chance to do so. That’s the part that’s going to hurt. Tragg will really go to town on that.”

  “But she didn’t tell them specifically that she had wiped the prints off the receiver or that you had intimated she should?”

  Mason shook his head. “Not specifically. It’s a plain inference from what she did tell them.”

  “Where is she now?”

  Mason grinned, and said, “Right now she’s out on habeas corpus. She’s not a fugitive from justice and she’s where the police are going to have one hell of a time finding her. Darned if I know why I do it, Della! But I always do.”

  “Do what?”

  “Stick my neck out for my clients. I should have taken the case just the way any other lawyer would have; taken the facts as they were and let the chips fall wherever they might. But no, I’m not built that way. I’m always a pushover for a client who is having the breaks go against her.”

  “After all,” Della Street said, “we’re not too certain that Marilyn Marlow is as innocent as she sounds.”

  “I can’t picture her as being guilty,” Mason said.

  “Not of murder, perhaps, but I do think she’s holding out on us somewhere along the line. I’m not satisfied with any explanation that has been made so far of why that ad was put in the lonely-hearts magazine. I still don’t think we know what she wanted with Kenneth Barstow.”

  Mason sat down at the desk, lit a cigarette, sighed wearily, then said to Della Street, “I told Paul Drake to be waiting for me. I gave him a few chores to do. Get hold of him on the telephone, will you, Della? We’ll get him in and then let him go to bed.”

  “Are you going to get some sleep?”

  “Darned if I know. I’m in what is sometimes referred to as ‘an unenviable position.’ I should have known Marilyn Marlow would have cracked the minute they started putting the pressure on her. She isn’t built right to withstand a lot of rough stuff.”

  Della Street said, “We have her word for what happened prior to the time we arrived there at Rose Keeling’s fiat—her word and that’s all!”

  Mason nodded and said, “Get Drake on the line.”

  Della Street put through the call, and a moment later had the detective on the line.

  “This is Della, Paul. The Chief’s here now. Want to come down? … Okay, I’ll have the door open for you.”

  Della Street hung up the telephone, crossed over and opened the door. A moment later they heard the sound of Drake’s steps in the corridor and then the tall detective droop-shouldered his way through the door and flopped in limp fatigue into the big easy chair.

  Della Street closed the door.

  Drake spun around so that he adopted his favorite position of sitting crossways in the chair.

  “What do you know, Paul?”

  “A lot of stuff,” Drake said. “I’ve checked Ralph Endicott’s alibi. You wanted me to. Police were checking it right along at the same time, so it was a cinch. It’s absolutely okay, completely watertight.”

  “No question?”

  “None whatever. Aside from ten or fifteen minutes between the time he left the dentist’s office and the time he got to the bank, every second of his time’s accounted for. And he didn’t leave the chess games until three hours after the murder had been committed.”

  Perry Mason started pacing the floor of the office, his coat unbuttoned, his thumbs pushed in the
armholes of his vest, his head thrust forward in thought.

  Abruptly he said, “I telephoned you about this other witness, Ethel Furlong. Did you get in touch with her?”

  Drake nodded.

  “What about her?”

  The detective thumbed through the pages of a notebook, said, “The police had her, giving her a shakedown. They let her go. My man interviewed her. The police were interested in finding out about the will and about what had happened. She tells a straightforward story. No one had ever offered her any money, either one way or the other. She was a witness to the will. Eleanore Marlow, Marilyn’s mother, called two nurses from the floor, Ethel Furlong and Rose Keeling. She told them that Mr. Endicott wanted to execute a will and wanted them to be witnesses. She says that Rose Keeling was called out on an emergency call at about the time the will was being read to Mr. Endicott, but that she returned before the will was signed and that when Endicott signed it, both of the nurses as well as Eleanore Marlow were in the room with him; and that he had to sign with his left hand, but that he seemed to be perfectly aware of what was going on; and he specifically stated to them that this was his will and he had signed it and that he wanted them to sign as witnesses.”

  “Ethel Furlong is positive about that?”

  “Positive.”

  “Had Rose Keeling approached her with any proposition?”

  “Nothing.”

  Mason resumed pacing the floor.

  “Of course,” he said after a few moments, “Marilyn Marlow called a turn when she said that she had to hold two witnesses in line in order to get anywhere. But the other side only needed to have one of the witnesses lined up to win their case.

  “When you come right down to it, it makes you a little hot under the collar to think of these brothers and sisters, who never gave a damn for George Endicott in his lifetime, sitting out there in his house and plotting and planning to beat Marilyn Marlow out of her inheritance. Apparently someone had made a payoff to Rose Keeling, and I don’t think it was Marilyn Marlow. But Endicott says it was and the police are going to be pretty apt to take his word for it.”

  Drake said, “It could be, of course, that both Ethel Furlong and Rose Keeling received a thousand bucks to make their testimony come out right, and Ethel Furlong is staying put. Rose Keeling was having an attack of jitters.”

  Mason said, “It’s possible, but I don’t warm up to the idea. What about Caddo, Paul? What did you find out about him?”

  “He and his wife had a battle and she threw an inkwell, I guess. He sent a suit out to the cleaners that was all spotted with ink. You knew, didn’t you, that the police found a playsuit with the blouse ripped open and ink spattered over it?”

  “No. Where?”

  “In the soiled clothes hamper of Rose Keeling’s flat.”

  Mason was excited now. “Was it Rose Keeling’s sunsuit?”

  “Apparently it was.”

  “Any police theories on that?”

  “None. They think she had been filling a fountain pen, and …”

  Mason gestured Paul Drake to silence, resumed pacing the floor, then abruptly he turned to face the detective.

  “Rose Keeling must have been murdered when she was leaving the bathroom.”

  “Yes. Apparently she was hit over the head with some blunt instrument, probably a blackjack,” Drake said. “She wasn’t stabbed until after she’d hit the floor.”

  Mason stopped his pacing abruptly. “How’s that?”

  “Someone sapped her before she was stabbed.”

  “That’s interesting!”

  “Why would they do that, Chief?” Della Street asked.

  Mason said, “Probably someone hiding behind the door, waiting for her to come out of the bathroom. The minute she did, this person hit her on the head. He did that because he had to be certain she wouldn’t make any noise and he wasn’t certain he could make a clean-cut stab that would kill her instantly. What about the time of death, Paul?”

  “Right around twelve o’clock.”

  Mason said, “The way I figure it, Della Street telephoned at just about the time the murder was being committed. The murderer was lying in wait for Rose Keeling to come out of the bathroom. The phone started ringing. That didn’t suit the murderer at all. He was afraid Rose might wrap a towel around her and rush out to answer the telephone. He knew that if that happened, she’d be on the run and he wouldn’t stand any chance to sneak up behind her and club her.”

  “So you think the murderer was the one who picked up the receiver to make the telephone quit ringing?” Drake asked.

  “I can’t figure any other explanation right at the present time. Do you know whether the police noticed any cigar ashes on the floor of Rose Keeling’s bedroom, Paul?”

  Drake shook his head. “If they noticed them, they’re keeping quiet about it. They haven’t told the newspaper men—I don’t think they found any.”

  “Have your men looked around, Paul?”

  “Naturally we couldn’t get into the flat. There’s a vacant lot on the south. The police looked around it a bit, thinking perhaps the murderer had tossed the knife out of a window in Rose Keeling’s flat after the crime had been committed. They didn’t find anything. My men looked around in the lot after the police left. I was with them. We searched every inch of it.”

  “No dice?” Mason asked.

  “No dice.”

  Mason paced the floor for a few moments, then asked, “You didn’t happen to notice any half-smoked cigar out there in the vacant lot while you were searching for the knife, did you?”

  Drake shook his head, then said, “Wait a minute. I remember Kenneth Barstow poking a half-smoked stogie with his foot. Barstow is quite a cigar smoker and claims to be a connoisseur of good cigars. He poked a half-smoked cigar with his foot and said, ‘That just goes to show, even the cops can’t finish the nickel cigars they sell nowadays.’”

  Mason’s eyes narrowed. “It was half smoked, Paul?”

  “Just about half smoked.”

  “A stogie?”

  “A regular rope,” Drake said. “One of those black stogies the cops chew on. It takes a man with a strong stomach to smoke more than half of one.”

  “And Barstow likes good cigars?”

  “That’s right, the best,” Drake said.

  Mason again started pacing the floor.

  “Of course,” Drake pointed out, “insofar as that inheritance is concerned, there’ll be a lot of public sympathy on behalf of the brothers and sister.”

  “Why?” Mason asked, snapping the question over his shoulder.

  “After all, they’re—well, the rightful heirs.”

  “What do you mean by that, Paul?”

  “They’re the blood relatives.”

  “And they didn’t give a damn about George Endicott until after he died. There’s altogether too much sloppy thinking about the ‘natural’ relatives being entitled to inherit. The only real protection an elderly man or a sick man has in this world is the power to dispose of his property the way he wants to. That enables him to reward special service and special attention if he gets it, and it enables him to hold his relatives in line. If a man couldn’t make a will leaving his property to whomever he wanted, relatives would simply crowd him into the grave as fast as they could—that is, lots of them would.”

  Drake said, “Of course, if your theory is correct, Perry—about the murderer being the one who lifted the receiver off the telephone—well, in that case the fingerprints on the receiver would have been the most important bit of evidence in the whole case.”

  Mason said nothing.

  “Just how did Marilyn Marlow get into the apartment?” Drake asked.

  “She says Rose Keeling gave her a key.”

  “How come?”

  Mason said, “Marilyn went to see Rose. Rose wanted to play tennis. Marilyn went back to her apartment to get her things. Rose gave Marilyn a key so Marilyn could get in when she came back. Marilyn went home, came b
ack and found Rose murdered. However, Marilyn says that she didn’t get in with the key. She says the door to the street at the foot of the stairs was actually open an inch or two when she returned, so she just pushed it open and walked in.”

  “That’s Marilyn’s story?”

  “That’s her story.”

  “When did she leave Rose?”

  “Right around eleven-thirty-five. Perhaps a few minutes earlier.”

  “When did she get back?”

  “She wasn’t in any particular hurry. She had some things to do. She bought some groceries and stopped by her bank. She got back about twelve-five.”

  “And in that time the murder had been committed?”

  “That’s right. Marilyn phoned me right around twelve-fifteen.”

  “You figure right around eleven-forty was the time of the murder?”

  Mason nodded.

  “When did Marilyn get to the bank?”

  “Not in time to give her an alibi. No one remembers seeing her in the grocery store.”

  “And Rose gave Marilyn a key?”

  “Right.”

  Drake said, “You aren’t going to like this, Perry, but after we gave Marilyn Marlow a green light to go ahead with Kenneth Barstow she told him she’d fix up a tennis game with Rose Keeling and she wanted him to get her a key to Rose’s flat, either by hook or crook. She said Rose had sold out and Marilyn said if she could get in and search the place at a time when she knew Rose would be playing tennis or something that would keep her occupied so Marilyn could have the time to search the way only a woman could…. She quit there. She didn’t tell Kenneth exactly what she expected to find.”

  Mason said, “Keep Kenneth out of circulation for a while, Paul.”

  “He’ll be discreet, Perry.”

  “Unless they ask him too much. Caddo knows about him.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Of course you can’t blame Marilyn.”

  “You mean you can’t,” Drake said, grinning.

  “Well, what the hell, Paul, Rose Keeling had sold her out. She simply had to get evidence one way or another.”