Эрл Гарднер - The Case of the Sleepwalker's Niece

“Do you mean you’re going to claim she killed Rease?” Burger shouted. “Why, that’s preposterous! It’s absurd!”

Mason inspected the end of his cigarette. “No,” he said, “I don’t think I’ll make any such claim. My case will doubtless be developed as we go along, Mr. Burger, but this discussion was confined to a suggestion on your part that I be considered in contempt of Court and also, I presume, held for disciplinary action on the part of the Bar Association. I merely mentioned this in order to explain that I had simply been conducting a test.”

Mason turned and strolled from the chambers. Slowly Judge Markham closed the Penal Code, put it back into place in the row of books along one side of his desk. He looked at Burger’s face and tried to keep from smiling.

“I,” the district attorney said, “will be damned.” Turning, he stamped from the chambers.

Judge Markham, looking over the courtroom, said, “You have now served your subpoena, Mr. Mason?”

“I have.”

“I believe Mr. Harris was being crossexamined?”

“Yes.”

“Come forward, Mr. Harris.”

There was no response. Burger, craning his neck, said, “Perhaps he has stepped out for a moment.”

“I had one more question I wanted to ask on crossexamination of Mr. Maddox,” Mason said, “we might fill in time by having Mr. Maddox come forward, if the Court will permit me to reopen the crossexamination for the purpose of asking that one question.”

“Any objection?” Judge Markham asked of Hamilton Burger.

“I may say for the benefit of Counsel,” Mason said, “that the question has become necessary because of unforeseen developments, to wit, the fact that Mrs. Doris Sully Kent is going to be a witness.”

“No,” the district attorney said, “I’ll make no objection to having the witness recalled. I think I have a question that I would like to ask him on redirect examination.”

“Mr. Maddox will please come forward,” the bailiff said. Once more there was no answering stir from the witnesses in the courtroom.

“Have you some other witness you can call?” Judge Markham inquired.

“Begging the Court’s pardon,” Mason said, “I would like to finish with the crossexamination of Mr. Harris before the case goes any further. The only exception I think I would care to make would be to ask a single question of Mr. Maddox.”

“Very well,” Judge Markham said.

There were several seconds of uncomfortable silence, then Judge Markham whirled around in his chair. “The Court will take a brief recess, during which the bailiff will find the missing witnesses,” he said.

Mason turned around to Peter Kent, slapped his hand down on Kent ’s knee, whispered, “All right, Peter. Within thirty minutes you’ll walk out of this courtroom a free man.”

Mason, entering his office, scaled his hat at a marble bust of Blackstone. The hat struck squarely, spun half around, and slid over on the statue’s head at a rakish angle. Della Street tried to be casual, but her eyes were starry. “Over the goal line, eh, Chief?”

“Right between the goal posts.”

“When did you get wise?” she asked.

“Darned if I know,” he told her, sitting on the edge of the desk and grinning boyishly. “Little facts kept pricking away at my consciousness. Why the devil should Edna Hammer have been reading up on sleepwalking? Why should she have put a lock on her door? Why did the figure that Duncan saw walk across the patio stop at the little coffee table; and why did the knife that was locked in the sideboard drawer disappear? Why did Maddox call Mrs. Kent at three o’clock in the morning, when he knew that a conference had already been arranged? I discounted most of Duncan ’s testimony because I figured he was just one of those egotistical ducks who would commit unconscious perjury. Give him a button and he’d sew a vest on it. But he’d undoubtedly seen someone walking around in a nightgown. When he said he put on his glasses he was a damn liar. He hadn’t. All he’d seen was a whiterobed figure walking around in the moonlight. When he surmised, from subsequent events, that this figure must have been Kent, he hypnotized himself into believing he’d recognized Kent. He was sufficiently partisan to make himself more and more positive. But that didn’t clear up the mysterious telephone conversation. Maddox was shrewd enough to avoid committing himself on the telephone call which Duncan put in around eleven o’clock in the evening to Mrs. Kent. His answers on direct examination didn’t give me any inkling that he’d been present. I intended, of course, to crossexamine Duncan about any prior telephone calls, because Mrs. Kent ’s statement over the telephone that a conference had already been arranged through Maddox’s lawyer indicated Duncan had been in touch with her. But Maddox did definitely state he hadn’t telephoned Mrs. Kent at three o’clock in the morning. I didn’t figure he’d perjure himself about something which could be checked up on. That made me start concentrating on Harris, and the minute I did that, I realized I was on the right trail. Harris was the one who had upset the apple cart all the way along the line. He’d been trying to get Kent convicted. When he realized Kent might have a good sleepwalking defense, he tried to blow it up by stating that the knife wasn’t in the drawer when Edna locked it. He allowed himself to be subpoenaed as a witness. He’d evidently telephoned in an anonymous tip or two to the district attorney’s office. Someone tipped Holcomb off that I’d been getting a duplicate knife to introduce to the case. When I asked Edna, she said she hadn’t told anyone; but later on she must have told Harris.”

“You weren’t really trying to mix the knives up, were you, Chief?”

“Of course not. All I was trying to do was to impress on Edna’s mind the importance of that knife in the sideboard drawer, so that she’d go to sleep with that thought uppermost in her mind.”

“And then you figured she’d walk in her sleep again?”

“Yes.”

“And take the knife?”

“Yes.”

“And what did you think she’d do with it?”

“If my reasoning was right, she’d do the same thing she did before, of course—put it under the top of the coffee table. It was her little private hiding place for things she didn’t want discovered.”

“And Harris knew that?”

“Of course he knew it. He’d been surreptitiously living with her as her husband for over a month. He had a key to the house and a key to the new lock Edna had installed on her bedroom door. Moreover, the clews which pointed to him fairly screamed for attention. He’d been watching the house in Santa Barbara. If he’d been where he said he was, he’d have seen Mrs. Kent leave the house, get out her car and start for Los Angeles. He didn’t see it. Therefore, he wasn’t there. But, if he wasn’t there, where was he? He could give the exact time of the telephone call which Mrs. Kent received at three o’clock in the morning. He could tell what she said over the wire. How could he have done that if he hadn’t been there? There was only one other explanation: He’d been the one who had put in the telephone call. As soon as I considered that possibility, I realized that it was the only explanation. It had been right there in the open all through the case, clamoring for attention, and we simply hadn’t thought of it. Harris, ostensibly, was watching the house in Santa Barbara to see that Mrs. Kent didn’t leave. He wanted to rush back to Los Angeles, commit a murder, and then return to Santa Barbara. He realized that if Mrs. Kent left the house in the meantime, it would be highly advisable for him to know that fact. Therefore, he decided to call her on the long distance telephone. Naturally, he couldn’t use his own name. Looking around for a plausible name to use, he picked on Maddox, because he figured it was a logical development for Maddox to try to get together with Mrs. Kent; the trouble was it was too logical; too well thought out. Through Duncan, Maddox had already telephoned to Mrs. Kent. By that telephone conversation, Harris accomplished two results which were very valuable to him. First, he made certain that Mrs. Kent was at her residence at three o’clock in the morning; second, he took notes of everything that she said so he could repeat the conversation and thereby make it seem he was there in Santa Barbara within a few minutes of the time the murder was committed.”