Эрл Гарднер - The Case of the Buried Clock

“This is the six-hundred block, two blocks more. About the middle of the block on the right-hand side... Okay, Perry, take it easy now... That looks like the place right ahead. There are lights in the windows.”

Mason slowed the car to a scant fifteen miles an hour, crept past the lighted house, turned the corner to the right.

“Circling the block?” Drake asked.

“Yes. I want to take another look at it. What do you make of it, Paul?”

“Darned if I know. Lights are on and the shades are up. You can look right into the place, but there doesn’t seem to be any sign of life.”

Mason kept the car at the fifteen-mile-an-hour pace as he circled the block. “It may be a trap, Paul.”

Drake said, “If no one’s home, let’s not go prowling around.”

“On the other hand,” Mason observed, “it might be that Adele Blane is in there. It’s not apt to be Milicent Hardisty; it can’t be Jack Hardisty... Oh well, let’s go see.”

“Promise me you won’t go in,” Drake pleaded. “If no one’s in there, and lights are on and perhaps the door unlocked, let’s not stick our necks in a noose.”

Mason said, “We’ll see what it looks like.”

They swung around the corner, back into D Street. Mason shifted into neutral and coasted up to the curb. He switched off the motor and lights and for a moment the two men sat in the car looking at the house.

“Front door’s open a crack,” Mason said. “You can see light around the edges.”

“Uh huh.”

“Of course, Paul, it may be that Vincent Blane has just stopped by. He may have a key.”

“I tell you, Perry, it’s a trap of some sort.”

“Well, let’s go up on the porch.”

“Promise you won’t go in?”

“Why all the holding back, Paul?”

“Because they’d accuse you of trying to find evidence and planning to conceal it. After all, Perry, we’re playing this whole thing pretty much in the dark.”

“I’ll say we are,” Mason agreed as they walked up the steps to the porch.

“Front door is open, all right,” Mason said pressing a thumb against the bell button.

The jangling sound of the bell came from the interior of the house, but there was no other sign of life or motion.

Drake, looking through the front window, said suddenly, “Oh, Perry! Take a look here, will you?”

Mason moved over to his side. Through the open window could be seen a massive, antique, mahogany writing desk. A slanting door dropped down to form an apron for writing, back of it were a series of pigeonholes.

The splintered lock on the writing desk told its own story. Papers, strewn about the floor, had apparently been pulled out from the pigeonholes, hastily unfolded, read and discarded in a helter-skelter of confusion.

Drake said, “That settles it, Perry. Let’s get out while the getting’s good.”

Mason hesitated a moment, standing in front of the window, then said with evident reluctance, “I guess that’s the only sensible thing to do. If we notify the police, they’ll always be suspicious we pulled the job, and then notified them after we had found and concealed what we wanted.”

Drake turned and started eagerly for the stairs on the porch. Mason paused long enough to push against the front door.

“Don’t do it, Perry,” Drake pleaded.

Mason said, “Wait a minute, Paul. Something’s wrong here. There’s something behind the door. Something that yields just a little yet blocks the door — it’s a man! I can see his feet!”

Drake, standing at the edge of the porch said, “All right, Perry, there’s nothing we can do. Telephone the cops if you feel that way about it. We just won’t give our names when we phone, that’s all. Let them come and see what it’s all about.”

Mason hesitated for a moment, then squeezed through into the room.

Drake said with angry sarcasm, “Sure, go ahead! Stick your neck in! Leave a few fingerprints! You aren’t in bad enough already. It won’t hurt you to discover a couple more corpses, and when I try to renew my license another black mark more or less won’t make any difference.”

Mason said, “Perhaps there’s something we can do, Paul,” and peered around at the object behind the door.

The man who lay sprawled on the floor was somewhere in the late fifties. A spare individual with high cheek bones, a long, firm mouth, big-boned hands and long arms. His slow stertorous breathing was plainly audible once Mason had entered the room.

Mason said, “Oh, Paul, take a look. He’s not dead, just knocked out... Don’t see any signs of a bullet wound — wait a minute, here’s a gun.”

Mason bent over the weapon. “A short-barreled .38,” he said. “There’s an odor of powder smoke. Looks as though it might have been fired... But I still can’t see any bullet wounds.”

Drake said, “For the love of Mike, Perry, come on out of there. We’ll telephone the police and let them wrestle with it.”

Mason, completely absorbed with the problem of trying to deduce what happened, said, “This bird has a leather holster on his belt. Looks as though it was his gun. He may have been the one who did the shooting and then perhaps he got slugged... Yes, here’s a bruise up on the left temple, Paul. Looks as though it might have been done with a blackjack or—”

A siren sounded with that peculiarly throbbing sequence of low notes which comes before and after the high-pitched scream. A blood-red spotlight impaled Paul Drake on the porch, swept past him to throw a reddish light through the half-open front door.

Drake said with what was almost a groan, “I should have known it!”

A voice from the outside barked a gruff command. “Come out of that! Get your hands up!”

There were steps. Paul Drake’s voice was raised in rapid explanations. Mason moved around the man’s feet to appear at the half-open front door.

Two men, evidently local officers, carrying guns and five-celled flashlights, tried to hide nervousness behind a gruff exterior. “What’s coming off here?” one of them demanded.

Mason said, “I’m Perry Mason, the lawyer. Milicent Hardisty is my client. I stopped by to see if she was home. We saw the lights and came up on the porch. As soon as I looked in the house, I saw something was wrong.”

The second man said in a low voice, “It’s Mason, all right. I’ve seen him before.”

“How long have you been here?” the first officer asked.

“Just a matter of seconds,” Mason said. “Just long enough to look inside. We were just starting to telephone for the police.”

“Oh yeah? This guy was coming down off the porch when we spotted him with the light.”

“Certainly.”

“There’s a telephone right here, ain’t there?”

Mason said scornfully, “And if we’d used it, you’d have bawled us out for obscuring fingerprints.”

“What’s happened?” the officer asked.

Mason said, “I don’t know. A man inside appears to have been slugged. There’s a gun lying on the floor.”

“Your gun?”

“Certainly not.”

“You do any shooting?”

“Of course not.”

“Hear any shot?”

“No. I’m not certain any were fired.”

“Somebody telephoned headquarters,” the officer said, “said that a shot had been fired in the Hardisty residence, and it looked like a murder.”

“How long ago was this?” Mason asked.

“Seven or eight minutes.”

Mason moved back through the half-opened door. “I don’t see any evidences of a bullet wound,” he said, “but there’s a bruise on the left temple.”

The two officers herded Drake in through the door, and then looked down at the unconscious figure.