Erle Gardner - Beware the Curves

“Go on,” I said.

“Karl took one look at John and was shaken. He led the way up to an upstairs office. He told John that he would be with him in a moment and stepped into an adjoining room.

“You have met John, Mr. Lam. I think you’re a good judge of character. There is something psychic about John. He is essentially a gentle soul, but as I say, he had lived in the jungle. He had been through unspeakable hardships, but he had always retained that sensitive, artistic insight.

“John has told me that after a few seconds he knew what Karl had in mind. Karl intended to murder him. He intended to shoot him down and claim that he had shot in self-defense. He intended to work some scheme of planting a revolver by John’s body and perhaps firing a shot from that revolver. He would claim that John had accused him of stealing his sweetheart, of—”

“Never mind the window dressing,” I said. “Just what did John do?”

“John quietly left the room and tiptoed down the stairs. He decided that he would face Karl in court and that he would face him with witnesses so that he would never again give Karl an opportunity to shoot and claim he was acting in self-defense.”

“And what happened?”

“John had just opened the front door and was leaving the house when he heard the revolver shot.”

“John knew that you had left?” I asked.

“He did. That was another of his telepathic or psychic hunches, or whatever you want to call them. He said that the minute he entered the house he knew that I had left. Perhaps it was something in the expression on Karl’s face. Perhaps it was just a feeling.”

“It wasn’t anything that Karl had said?” I asked.

“No. He says not.”

“All right, what did John do?”

“He walked out to the highway. He hitchhiked back to Los Angeles. He read in the papers of Karl’s death, and read about the taxi driver who described him so perfectly that John knew that if anyone knew he was alive he would be accused of Karl’s murder and he wouldn’t stand a ghost of a chance.

“John had every reason in the world to kill Karl, but he— Well, you can see for yourself, Mr. Lam, unless the real murderer of Karl could be found, John didn’t stand a whisper of a chance.”

“So what happened?”

She said, “I knew where John would be. I went to him that night. We discussed matters. It was decided that John would have to keep out of sight until the person who had killed Karl could be brought to justice. That would be easy because everyone thought John was dead. So we started a long nightmare.

“John kept under cover. I did everything I could to solve the murder of my husband. I had to go back and take charge of the estate. I inherited Karl’s money because he hadn’t had time to disinherit me and I never enjoyed anything more than stepping into the fortune Karl had left.”

“But how about the person who murdered Karl Endicott?”

“Cooper Hale murdered Karl Endicott,” she said, “but we can’t prove it. We’re never going to be able to prove it. Cooper Hale is too smart. Hale knew in some way what was taking place. He followed Karl when Karl went upstairs. Remember Karl was getting out a revolver which he intended to plant on John’s body. Karl intended to call Hale in as a witness to show that the shooting had been in self-defense.

“Hale stepped into the room, calmly picked up the revolver, shot Karl through the head, then went back downstairs and telephoned for the police.”

“What was Hale’s motivation?” I asked.

“That I don’t know. I do know this: that my husband had withdrawn twenty thousand dollars from the bank that day. I think he knew John was alive and was preparing to pay him the twenty thousand bonus which had been agreed upon. For some reason he wanted to pay that in cash. That twenty thousand vanished.

“However, for two months my husband had been paying blackmail, ten thousand a month.

“Hale had been a clerk. Suddenly he became affluent. Hale has grown steadily during the years since Karl’s death. He is now an influential banker.”

“All right. Let’s get down to the present,” I said. “What happened?”

“Police watched me day and night. They sensed that I might be in communication with the person they felt was the murderer. I was very, very careful. I went into hibernation in order to protect John. Gradually the police relaxed their vigil. It became possible for John and me to see each other, but we had to meet at rare intervals and under such surreptitious circumstances that it was heartbreaking. Remember everyone thought John Ansel was dead.

“Drude Nickerson was, of course, the only witness. And then I read that Drude Nickerson had been killed in a traffic accident. I didn’t dare to show interest in the matter, but we felt that it would be possible for John to contact a detective agency, provided the detective agency knew nothing about where John was living so that if anything happened the police couldn’t follow up and arrest John.

“Then we found out that Nickerson definitely was dead and that the police had thrown up their hands in the case. I suppose we were terribly foolish but we had been starving ourselves emotionally over the years, we had been meeting so surreptitiously that much of the pleasure was taken from the meetings, and we had reason to believe that the police had virtually written the case off the books.

“The very thought of being able to live together openly as man and wife, of being able to face the world, completely swept us off our feet. We decided that sooner or later we were going to have to face the whole situation, and we decided to face it now.”

“So,” I said, “you walked into the trap.”

She twisted her gloves violently. “We walked into the trap. We flew to Yuma. We walked into a justice of the peace to get married, and the officers were waiting. Oh, it was so terribly cruel! Why did they have to strike at that time? At least they could have held off until we were married, and—”

“And then they couldn’t have forced you to testify,” I said. “They let the thing go right up to the time of the wedding so they could prove motivation.”

“It was all a trap,” she admitted. “The police had arranged the thing as an elaborate plant. They knew that Drude Nickerson was their only witness. They knew that if he died they didn’t have a case. So they — well, they prepared this elaborate trap. They fixed it up with Nickerson. Tomorrow the newspapers will state that the reports of his death were erroneous, that they were based on the identification of some hitchhiker who happened to have one of Nickerson’s cards in his pocket.

I shook my head. “No, they won’t.”

“What do you mean, they won’t?” she said. “They’ve already told us that—”

“They’ll have another idea by the time they think things over,” I said. “They will ballyhoo it for what it was, a clever police trap by which they lured a fugitive from justice, who had eluded them for six years, into the police net.”

She twisted her gloves again, and this time her face twisted with feeling, but she was dry-eyed and her voice was as low-pitched and as deadly as the sound made by a snake’s rattles.

“I could kill the man who did this to us.”

“That won’t help,” I said.

“What am I going to do?” she asked.

That was Bertha’s cue. “Mrs. Endicott has placed herself entirely in our hands, Donald, and there’s no need at all to worry about the financial arrangements. We have worked those out. She got in touch with me just as soon as the officers made the arrest.

“Now, Donald, we want you to get busy and work on this case. There’s enough involved so we can completely exclude all other business matters from our minds and concentrate on this case.”