Erle Gardner: he Case of the Stuttering Bishop

"When Stella pulled the trigger of the automatic, the shots were plainly audible to both Sacks and the bishop. Both must have realized what those shots might mean. Harry Coulter was driving a car, and the sound of his motor and the rain on the roof kept him from hearing the shots. Bishop Mallory didn't have a car, so he started for the scene of the shooting on foot. Sacks started in Janice Brownley's car and therefore was the first to arrive. He saw what had happened, probably made a closer examination than Bixler had and saw Brownley wasn't dead. He slid into Brownley's car, threw it into gear, ran it to the nearest pier, pointed it for the bay, left it in low gear and opened the hand throttle. Then he went back to Janice's car and started to drive away, only to encounter Bishop Mallory running toward the scene of the shots. Sacks recognized the bishop, swung the car toward him and smacked the bishop down, fracturing his skull and probably thinking he'd killed him. But he didn't want Bishop Mallory found there, so he loaded him into the car, carried him to the outskirts of Los Angeles and then dumped him out, after first removing all evidence of the bishop's identity and…"

Mason was interrupted by Paul Drake's code knock on the door. "All right, Della," he said, "let's see what Drake's uncovered."

Della started to the door, paused halfway to say, "But why wouldn't Julia Branner have talked, and why wouldn't Janice Seaton…?"

"Because," Mason said, "Julia Branner thought Bishop Mallory and her daughter were keeping quiet because of some very important reason. She wasn't going to say a word until she knew where they stood. Janice Seaton knew that Bishop Mallory had placed her aboard the yacht telling her not to move from it until she heard from him. She probably thought there had been some trouble in getting Renwold Brownley to come down to the yacht. Unless I miss my guess badly, she doesn't even know anything about the murder."

Della Street nodded, opened the door. Drake burst excitedly into the office and said, "You'll never guess what we found aboard that yacht, Perry-not in a hundred years! We found…"

Della Street interrupted him to say, "Janice Seaton, still waiting for Bishop Mallory to return. She didn't even know Renwold had been murdered."

Drake stared at her with his mouth sagging open. "How the hell did you know?" he asked.

Della Street closed her right eye in a surreptitious wink at Perry Mason. "Elementary, my dear Watson," she said, "elementary. My feminine mind reasoned it out from the facts of the case."

Drake sat down weakly in the nearest chair. "I," he announced, "will be damned."

It was noon of the next day that Mason hung up the telephone, nodded to Della Street and said, "The autopsy shows he met his death by drowning."

"Where does that put everyone?" she asked.

"It makes Stella Kenwood guilty of a technical assault with a deadly weapon. It makes Peter Sacks and Victor Stockton guilty of first degree murder. The autopsy shows Brownley would probably have bled to death from a bullet wound which had severed one of his large arteries, but it also shows unmistakably that his death was actually caused by drowning."

"Can the district attorney prove the conspiracy between Sacks and Stockton?"

Mason grinned and said, "That's up to him. I'm not running the district attorney's office, but I think he can. Stockton left himself wide open when he arranged such an elaborate alibi for Janice before he had any reason to believe Brownley was going to be murdered."

"I take it," she said slowly, "that in the future Burger won't be so quick to issue warrants for your arrest."

Mason grinned and said, "As a matter of fact, Burger has asked me if I'll have dinner with him this evening. He wants to 'talk over the case.' Now that Bishop Mallory's regained consciousness and is going to live, Burger's got a pretty good case. I drove over to the hospital this morning to see the bishop. Mallory remembers seeing the yellow coupe, saw it swerve and deliberately drive into him. That, of course, is the last he remembers, but with the dent on the fender and human bloodstains on the back of the seat, Burger's got a pretty good case of circumstantial evidence. And remember, these men are rats. They'll turn on each other when it comes to a show-down, particularly if the D.A. can make Sacks think Stockton deliberately engineered it so he'd be in the clear and Sacks would climb the thirteen steps to the gallows."

"It all clicks, Chief," said Della slowly. "But there's one thing that still puzzles me. If the bishop is a real bishop, and not a phoney, what about that stutter?"

Mason grinned. "I thought of that myself," he said. "I asked Mallory about it this morning. He told me all about it: It seems that when he was a boy, he used to stutter. He cured himself of the habit, but every time he got an emotional shock, the stutter would come back to him. When he met the false Janice Brownley on the ship, and realized that she was a fake, and that his promise to Charles Seaton kept him from exposing a serious crime, he was so upset that he began stuttering again. He was still suffering from that shock when he came into my office."