Эрл Гарднер: The Case of the Buried Clock

Both Hamilton Burger and McNair were on their feet, both objecting at once. Judge Canfield heard their objections with a frosty smile, said calmly, “Objection overruled. Answer the question.”

Beaton, seeming somewhat dazed, said, “Yes, sir. It could be done.”

Mason said, “I think that’s all, Mr. Beaton... Oh, by the way, I believe the time you noted for the taking of the picture of Burton Strague was at approximately the same time the house of Jack Hardisty in Roxbury was being burglarized, and the night watchman, George Crane, was slugged?”

“I... I believe it was. I hadn’t, of course, thought of it in that connection before.”

Mason bowed with exaggerated courtesy to the two prosecuting attorneys who sat staring, open-mouthed, at the witness. “Have you gentlemen any questions on redirect examination?” he asked.

Burger seemed as one in a daze. He turned his eyes from the witness to Mason, then leaned forward to indulge in a whispered conference with McNair.

“Your Honor,” Hamilton Burger said, after a few moments, “this is a most remarkable development. It not only puts a completely new interpretation upon much of the evidence in this case, but it opens up possibilities that — if the Court please, we’d like an adjournment until tomorrow morning.”

“No objection,” Mason said.

“Granted,” Judge Canfield snapped.

Back in his office, Mason opened a drawer in his desk, took out a bottle of rare old cognac, three large snifter glasses, said to Paul Drake and Della Street, “Well, now we can relax. At last I’ve got that damn clock off of my mind.”

“I don’t get it,” Drake said.

Mason laughed. “Suppose, Paul, we had found an alarm clock buried in the ground near a point where a man intended to plant a camera to take nocturnal pictures. Suppose we’d further found that one of the persons in the case relied upon a picture taken at night to establish an alibi. What would we have thought?”

Drake said, “Well, of course, if you put it that way.”

“That’s the only way to put it,” Mason said. “Those are the simple facts. Too many times we overlook the simple facts in order to consider a lot of extraneous complications which merely confuse the issue. I was responsible for it, Paul. It should be a lesson to me. I tried to work in a lot of stuff about sidereal time in order to get the district attorney of Kern County interested. Naturally, that stuff got into the newspapers, and naturally the murderer read all about it. Therefore, when he got ready to let me discover the clock, it was only natural he would set it on sidereal time.”

“But why would he want you to discover it?”

“Because I had started confusing the issues and he thought it would be a good thing to confuse them still more.”

“Just what do you think happened?” Della asked.

Mason said, “I can’t give you all the details, but I could make a pretty good guess. Vincent Blane had a magazine article lying around his house about how scopolamine would make witnesses talk, confessing crimes which they were really trying to conceal. Naturally, Vincent Blane read it; Martha Stevens, his housekeeper, read it; Adele Blane read it, and Milicent Hardisty read it. Probably all of them thought of that article when it became known that Jack Hardisty had embezzled another ninety thousand dollars and hidden it... Martha Stevens got her boy friend, went so far as to make a practical test. Martha got Milicent Hardisty to procure the drug for her, and then surreptitiously borrowed Milicent Hardisty’s gun. Remember, Martha learned of the second embezzlement from overhearing Blane’s telephone conversation.

“Milicent didn’t learn about the ninety thousand embezzlement until the day of the murder. When she found it out, she was furious. She obviously knew her husband was going to the cabin, and decided on a showdown. She couldn’t find her own gun, but her father had a gun that was in the house. She picked it up and started up to the cabin. That, however, was after Martha and Smiley had gone to the cabin. She parked her car near the turnoff to the cabin and then became hysterical, and the very force of the nervous storm served to calm her and give her a sane perspective on what she was about to do. She went back and threw the gun away, met Adele, started back to the house. Dr. Macon picked her up in Kenvale. She told him about what had happened. Macon wanted her to go back to the cabin, either to remove some evidence indicating she had been there, to find the gun she had thrown away, or because he didn’t entirely believe her story and wanted to check up on what had happened... They got to the cabin well after dark, unwittingly passing Martha and Smiley in the dark on the road, found Jack Hardisty dying. Milicent said she knew nothing about it. You can hardly blame Dr. Macon if he didn’t believe her.”

“But who killed him?” Della Street asked.

“Martha Stevens gave him a hypodermic of scopolamine,” Mason said. “When Jack told them about hiding the money in the tunnel, he wasn’t faking. He was telling them the simple truth. They went up to the tunnel, and the money wasn’t there. That means someone must have beaten them to it. That person must have removed the money almost as soon as Hardisty had buried it, and then gone on down to the cabin. We can reconstruct what happened then. He found Jack Hardisty drugged and talkative, telling the absolute truth under the influence of the drug. He found the car in which Martha and Smiley had driven up, and of course, Hardisty’s car was there also. Hardisty’s glasses were broken. He was probably sitting on that big rock outcropping, and the gun which Martha had surreptitiously taken from Milicent Hardisty was lying there on the pine needles where Smiley had thrown it when he hit Hardisty.

“Now this newcomer must have been a friend of Hardisty’s; more than a friend — a partner, an accomplice. And he must have been planning to kill Hardisty for some time.”

“How do you know that?” Della asked.

“The evidence shows it. When he’d planted that alarm clock the first time, he intended to use it to manufacture an alibi. But he didn’t use it because that day Beaton didn’t put the camera in that location, and, instead of staying to watch the cameras that night, he took Myrna Payson to a movie.”

“But why would this partner want to kill Hardisty?”

Mason smiled. “Put yourself in his place. Hardisty had got caught. Hardisty was going to jail. He was Hardisty’s accomplice — and if he had Hardisty out of the way, he’d not only seal his lips but be ninety thousand to the good with no one ever suspecting... The first embezzlement had been a scant ten thousand. That represented money they’d ‘borrowed,’ probably to finance a mining venture or horse races or stock gambling. The ninety thousand embezzlement was an attempt at blackmail, and it didn’t work.

“Put yourself in Burt Strague’s position. Jack Hardisty was going to the penitentiary. If Jack talked, Burt Strague would also go up as an accessory. He had intended to make away with Hardisty if he could do so safely. That’s why he first planted the alarm clock where he expected Rodney Beaton was going to set up one of his cameras. He was arranging in advance to give himself an alibi... He came on Jack Hardisty, drugged. Jack Hardisty probably told him he had left some incriminating evidence in that writing desk, evidence that showed the original embezzlement had gone into a joint venture with Burt Strague. And he also told Strague that Martha Stevens had drugged him and that he’d told them where he’d left the money, that he was tired of it all, that he didn’t have the nerve to go through with it. When Martha and her boy friend returned from the tunnel, Hardisty was going to tell them everything.”