Эрл Гарднер: The Case of the Buried Clock

“Where was Milicent all this time?” Drake asked.

“At that particular moment she was probably just parking her car at the turnoff, and starting to walk to the cabin. However, she never did get there. She had hysterics, went back to the road, threw the gun she’d taken with her — her father’s gun — away. She then met Adele, went back as far as Kenvale, met Dr. Macon, talked with him and finally returned to the cabin at Dr. Macon’s suggestion. Probably Macon wanted to find that gun — and he may have doubted if Milicent’s recollection of what had happened while she was hysterical was entirely accurate.

“When he arrived he found Hardisty in bed, dying from a gunshot wound. He naturally assumed Milicent, in her hysteria, had gone a lot farther than she remembered, and that a merciful amnesia had blanked the worst part of what had happened from her mind. That frequently happens in hysteria. In fact Legal Medicine and Toxicology by those three eminent authorities, Gonzales, Vance and Helpern, mentions hysteria as an authentic cause of amnesia. So you can begin to see Dr. Macon’s position. He felt certain the woman he loved had killed her husband, probably in self-defense, had become hysterical and the hysteria had erased the memory from her mind.

“But to get back to Burt Strague and Hardisty. There was an argument. Hardisty blurted out some things he shouldn’t have said. Burt Strague shot him, probably in a struggle. Then, alarmed, he got the wounded man up to the cabin and into bed. He realized Hardisty was dying. He knew that the mud on Hardisty’s shoes would show that he’d been to the tunnel. Naturally, he cleaned the shoes, because Burt had removed the money buried there in the tunnel almost as soon as Hardisty had driven away, and he wanted Martha and Smiley to think Hardisty had lied about the tunnel.

“Burt Strague knew that Martha Stevens and her boy friend would very shortly return from their fruitless search of the tunnel. He jumped in Hardisty’s automobile, drove it down the grade and off over the embankment. That got rid of the automobile... He didn’t have a chance to dispose of some of the other evidence, as he would have liked to. Not until the next morning did he get a chance to dig up his clock — and he had to burglarize the writing desk in the Hardisty residence. That was a ticklish job. When it came to doing it, he relied on the alibi he had already cooked up.”

“But how could he have left his picture in the camera,” Della Street asked, “if he wasn’t actually there?”

“Very easily,” Mason said. “With his own camera, he took a flashlight picture of himself walking along the trail. He kept that undeveloped negative in reserve. When Rodney Beaton set up his camera, which was probably right after dark, Burt, taking care to avoid tripping the string which would release the shutter, went up and left tracks in the trail. Then he unscrewed the first element of the lens, inserted the carbon paper disk, replaced the lens, and substituted his exposed film for the one that was in that camera. Remember that it was dark by this time, and he could work by a sense of touch without needing a darkroom. He buried his alarm clock, adjusted the mechanism so it would trip the string and shoot off the flashbulb at the proper time, and then beat it for Roxbury. Remember his slender build. He dressed himself in his sister’s clothes, slugged the guard, broke open the desk, got what he was after, returned to the mountains, removed the carbon paper disk from the lens, then went to the Blane cabin, and told the story of having searched all over for Rodney Beaton and his sister... Those are the high points. You can fill in the details.”

“But why was the clock twenty-five minutes slow when it was first found?” Drake asked.

Mason grinned. “Because, in order to make the thing work right, Burt Strague wanted to have his alarm clock synchronized with Rodney Beaton’s watch, and Rodney Beaton’s watch was notoriously inaccurate, so Burt made an excuse to get the time from Beaton and then set his own watch accordingly, and subsequently set the alarm clock according to that time... Once the clock was discovered, we might have tumbled to what it was all about if it hadn’t been for the fact that I, myself, mixed the case up by injecting this angle of sidereal time. Having done this to fool the police and the district attorneys of Kern and Los Angeles Counties, I then proceeded to get fooled by it myself, because the murderer promptly picked up my idea and adopted it as his own... And now, we’re going to quit talking about the case and have a drink of good old brandy.”

“What will they do?” Della Street asked.

“They’ll figure the thing out, give Burt Strague the third-degree, and probably get a confession,” Mason said. “Strague is something of a weakling, an introvert — the type that is emotional. He won’t be a hard nut to crack. I feel sorry for his sister, though. She couldn’t have known anything about it, and she’s a nice kid... Well, here’s to crime.”

The door from the outer office opened. Gertie said, “Mr. Vincent Blane is here. He says he must see you at once.”

“Show him in,” Mason said.

As Vincent Blane entered the office, Mason took another glass from the drawer of his desk.

“You’re just in time,” Mason said.

Blane was so excited he could hardly talk. “He confessed,” he said. “They got him. He told them all about it, and where he hid the ninety thousand he hijacked from the mine — and about planting that picture. It was an alibi so he could get into Jack’s home and—”

Mason said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Blane, we just finished a postmortem on the case, and decided we weren’t going to talk about it until we’d had one good drink.”

Vincent Blane seemed somewhat annoyed for a moment, then he grinned and dropped wearily into the big overstuffed leather chair. “At times, Mr. Mason,” he said, “you get some remarkably fine ideas. If there’s enough of that stuff in the bottle, let’s make it two good drinks.”