Erle Gardner - The Case of the Substitute Face

Scudder said, “Your Honor, if I may say just one word.”

Judge Romley nodded permission.

“This is merely a flimsy technicality,” Scudder said. “But I will meet Counsel on his own ground. Let us suppose that no one can testify that Mrs. Moar shot and killed Carl Moar, but someone did drag a man to the rail and throw him overboard. Now, I will show by Captain Hanson that the condition of the sea was such at that time that a man couldn’t live for ten minutes, even if he were a most expert swimmer in...”

“But no one has testified that any man was thrown overboard,” Mason said.

“Miss Fell saw...”

Mason smiled as the trial deputy suddenly lapsed into silence.

Judge Romley said, “This is a most peculiar situation, Counselor.”

Mason said affably, “Isn’t it, your Honor?” and sat down.

“I can reach it in another way,” Scudder said desperately. “Let me ask Captain Hanson a few more questions.”

“Very well,” Judge Romley said. “Go ahead.”

“What happened on that ship, so far as you know, of your own knowledge, shortly after nine o’clock in the evening of the sixth?” Scudder asked.

“The operator telephoned the bridge that a man was overboard. I immediately took necessary steps to do everything in my power to find this man, and, if possible, rescue him. I swung the ship in a sharp turn back onto the course which we had been following. I threw over light flares and life buoys with light flares attached. I continued to search the water for more than an hour and a half, and then proceeded into San Francisco.”

“Did you take steps to ascertain the identity of any person who might have been missing from the ship?”

Captain Hanson scratched his head and said, “Well, we did and we didn’t.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, we started to call the roll,” Captain Hanson said. “We ordered all the passengers to their staterooms. Then this Miss Fell came to me and told me that it was...”

“Never mind what someone told you, Captain,” Judge Romley interrupted, “just state what you did.”

“Well,” Captain Hanson said, “before we’d checked all of the staterooms, we started checking on Mr. Newberry, or Moar, I suppose his real name is. We couldn’t find him, and we did find evidence that his wife...”

“Never mind any of that evidence now,” Judge Romley interrupted. “What we are trying to do now is to prove the corpus delicti .”

“Well,” the captain remarked patiently, “I don’t know what that is all, I know is what I did.”

“Then you never did check all of the staterooms and all of the passengers against the passenger list?”

“Not then,” Captain Hanson admitted.

Scudder, desperately worried, said, “Your Honor, I have not concluded. I appreciate the position in which the Prosecution finds itself. It’s rather a unique position. I may say, of course, that as a Prosecutor, I have no sympathy with a criminal who seeks to hide behind a technicality...”

“That will do,” Judge Romley interrupted. “You will confine your remarks to the proper subjects, Counselor. You know such remarks are improper.”

“I beg the Court’s pardon,” Scudder said. “My feelings got the better of me. May I ask, if the Court please, that we have an adjournment until three o’clock this afternoon? There’s one more witness I hope to be able to produce at that time.”

Judge Romley nodded. “The request is rather unusual, but the circumstances are equally unusual. The Court will take a recess until three o’clock this afternoon,” he said.

Drake pushed his way through the spectators, to reach Mason’s side. “Okay, Perry,” he said, “I think we have something.”

“On Della?” Mason asked.

Drake nodded.

Mason bent over the chair in which Mrs. Moar was sitting. “That,” he told her in a whisper, “just about blows up their case. Judge Romley doesn’t believe in binding defendants over when it will be impossible to obtain a conviction in the Superior Court. He’ll give you just as fair a hearing here as though you were on trial before a jury, and Aileen Fell’s testimony isn’t going to carry very much weight. All she saw was two figures struggling on the deck, and she saw them rather indistinctly.”

Mrs. Moar squeezed his hand gratefully.

“I have to run out on an important matter,” Mason said. “I’ll see you at three o’clock this afternoon.” He turned to Drake and said, “Okay, Paul, let’s go.”

Belle Newberry grabbed his hand as Mason started to leave the courtroom. “You darling!” she exclaimed.

Mason smiled down at her, patted her shoulder, and said, “You’ll have a chance to visit with your mother for a few minutes before the matron takes her back. I’ll see you later, Belle.”

Drake had a car waiting in front of the courthouse.

“All right,” Mason said eagerly, “what have you found, Paul?”

Drake said, “I don’t know, Perry. I don’t want to be the one to tell you. I’d rather you’d see for yourself.”

“What the devil are you getting at?” Mason asked.

Drake shook his head and said, “Get in, Perry. It won’t be long.”

“Where is it?”

“Over in Berkeley.”

“Well then, let’s get started,” Mason snapped.

The car dashed across Market Street and turned to the left, to speed down the boulevard leading to the bridge which crossed the bay.

“Look here,” Mason said, “there are only three of us. If we’re going to have trouble with Eves—”

“We’re not going to have any trouble with Eves,” Drake said. “He didn’t have anything to do with Della’s disappearance.”

“How do you know?” Mason asked.

“I’ll tell you more about it in a few minutes,” Drake said. “In the meantime, I think I know what was the trouble with Eves.”

“Go ahead and spill it,” Mason said. “Or do you want to be mysterious about that, too?”

“Now, take it easy, Perry,” the detective cautioned. “I’m just trying to be fair all around. You’ll understand my position when—”

“Forget it,” the lawyer interrupted savagely. “Tell me what you can tell me and quit beating around the bush.”

“Well, about Eves,” Drake said. “I think Eves was planning some sort of a big bunco game, and this murder knocked him out of it.”

“Go ahead, ” Mason told him impatiently.

“Well, when I looked up Roger P. Cartman in Honolulu,” Drake said, “I found he’d been injured in an automobile accident, all right, and had suffered a broken neck. But that was three months ago. He was a wealthy visitor from the Mainland who was caught in a skidding car on the Pali, and—”

Mason interrupted, to say to the driver, “For God’s sake, get some speed out of this bus. I’ll pay the fines.”

The driver lurched the car into speed. Drake glanced apprehensively through the rear-view mirror and said, “A car tagging along behind, Perry. It may be a prowl car.”

“I don’t care if it is,” Mason said irritably. “I said I’ll pay the fines. You were talking about Eves and Cartman. What about him?”

“Well,” Drake said, “Cartman had a lot of money. Doctors put a brace on him, which held his head absolutely rigid and he came over to the Mainland—”

“I know that already,” Mason interrupted.

“No, you don’t,” Drake said, “because Cartman came over to the Mainland six weeks ago.”

“He did what!” Mason asked, staring at the detective.

“Came over to the Mainland six weeks ago, and he came over on a clipper plane.”

“Then why did he go back to Honolulu?” Mason asked.

“He swears he didn’t,” Drake said.