Erle Gardner - The Case of the Horrified Heirs

Then her phone rang. A woman said, «I found your name in the telephone directory. I just wanted to call you to tell you how glad I am that you beat that horrible frameup.»

«Thank you very much,» Virginia said.

«I'm a stranger to you,» the woman went on, «but I wanted you to know how I felt.»

Within the next hour there were five more calls, including one from a man who was obviously drunk and certainly offensive, and another from a woman who wanted a willing ear to hear about her case.

Finally, Virginia ignored the telephone, which continued to ring, until she went out to dinner.

The next morning she asked the telephone company to change her number and give her an unlisted one.

Virginia found she couldn't entirely get the matter of those papers off her mind.

After all, Julian Bannock had been a rancher. He and his brother had not been particularly close, and Julian was interested only in liquidating everything in the estate and getting rid of it just as rapidly as possible.

Virginia knew there had been many important probate proceedings and agreements, but after she had turned the key over to Julian Bannock, she had paid no more attention to the estate.

But the thought of those files left her vaguely uneasy, and there had been a false note about George Menard. He had seemed all right until she had asked him about himself, then he had suddenly become evasive. She felt sure he had been lying about his background.

After all, she felt something of a responsibility for those files.

She called Information to try to place a call to Julian Bannock at Bakersfield and was informed he still had no telephone.

She tried to forget the matter and couldn't. Suppose Menard was up to something tricky.

She wanted to find out about his car registration but didn't know how to go about it without consulting Perry Mason, and she felt she had bothered him too much already.

She determined to drive out to Bakersfield and talk things over with Julian Bannock.

She left at daylight, made inquiries at Bakersfield, and found that Julian Bannock lived some ten miles out of the city.

She located his mailbox, drove in for some three hundred yards, came to a yard with a barn, several sheds, a house, shade trees and a variety of farming implements-tractors, cultivators, hayrakes, disks-stored more or less haphazardly in the yard.

A dog ran barking to the car, and Julian Bannock came out.

Despite the fact she had only seen him in his «dressed up» clothes, she recognized him instantly in his coveralls and work shirt.

«Hello!» he said.

«Hello, Mr. Bannock. Remember me? I'm Virginia Baxter. I was your brother's secretary.»

«Oh, yes,» he said, his voice cordial. «Sure. I knew I'd seen you before somewhere. Well, come on in. We'll fix you up a breakfast, eggs from our own yard, and maybe you'd like some homemade bread and preserves-fruit right off our own trees here.»

«That would be wonderful,» she said, «but I wanted to talk with you about a few things.»

«What?»

«Those papers that you took,» she said. «Those filing cases. Where do you have them?»

He grinned at her. «Oh, I sold all those quite a while ago.»

«Not the files?»

«Well, I told the fellow to take everything. The stuff was cluttering up a lot of room here and-You know what? Mice were getting in those papers. They'd get up in there and start chewing on the papers to make nests.»

«But what actually became of the papers? Did the man who bought the files-«

«Oh, the papers! No, they're here. The man who bought the filing cases wouldn't take the papers. He dumped the papers all out. He said the papers made the files too heavy to carry.»

«And you burned them up?»

«No, I tied them up in bundles with binder twine. I guess the mice are getting in there pretty bad-you know the way it is around a ranch, you have a barn and mice live in the barn.

«We've got a couple of cats now that have been keeping things down pretty well, but-«

«Would it be all right to take a look?» she said. «I'd just like to see about some of the old papers.»

«Funny thing,» he said, «that you'd be worrying about those. There was a fellow here yesterday.»

«There was?»

«That's right.»

«A man about forty-five?» she asked. «With very intense black eyes and a small stubby mustache? He wanted-«

Julian Bannock interrupted her by shaking his head. «No,» he said, «this was a fellow around fifty-five but he had bluish sort of eyes and was sort of light-complected.

«This fellow's name was Smith. He wanted to find some agreement or other.»

«And what did you do?»

«I told him where the papers were, told him to look around and help himself if he wanted. I was busy and he seemed a mighty nice fellow!'

«Did he find what he wanted?»

Julian Bannock shook his head. «He said that things were too much of a mess for him to unscramble. He said he didn't know anything about the files. If he could get hold of the key to the filing system, he thought he could maybe find the paper he wanted.

«He asked me if I knew anything about how the files were classified and I told him I didn't.»

«It was all handled according to numbers,» Virginia said. «General classifications. For instance, number one to a thousand was personal correspondence. Number one thousand to three thousand represented contracts. Three thousand to five thousand, probate. Five thousand to six thousand, wills. Six thousand to eight thousand, agreements. Eight thousand to ten thousand, real estate transactions.»

«Well, I didn't disturb anything. I put all that stuff in packages and tied them up with binder twine.»

«Could we take a look?» Virginia asked.

«Why, sure.»

Julian Bannock led the way into the relative coolness of the barn, redolent with the clean smell of hay.

«Used to keep this barn pretty full of hay,» he said, «and had quite a storage problem. Lately, I've been selling the hay because I haven't been doing much feeding. Used to have a little dairy business, but they've got so many headaches now that the small dairyman has too much of a problem; too much work; too many regulations.

«The real big dairies are handling things now with mechanical milkers, feeders and all that sort of thing-I didn't get too much for those filing cases, either. Could have kept the stuff in the cases, I guess, but I don't know what anybody'd want with all that stuff-thought some of pitching it all out and burning it up, but you talked so much about the files, I thought I'd keep them.»

«Well, of course, that was some time ago,» Virginia said. «As time passes, those files cease to have quite as much importance.»

«Well, here we are, over here. This used to be a tractor shed, but I got room to put these-Well, what do you know!»

Bannock stopped in surprise before the litter of papers strewn all over the floor.

«Looks like that fellow left a hell of a mess,» he said angrily.

Virginia looked in dismay at the piles of paper.

The man who had been in there had evidently cut the binder twine that had held the papers in different classifications and had pawed through everything looking for the paper he wanted, throwing the other papers helterskelter into a pile which had spread out into an area some six feet in diameter at the bottom and some four feet high.

Virginia, looking at the carbon copies now ragged at the edges from the gnawing of mice, thinking of the care she had taken with those papers when she had typed them, felt like crying.

Julian Bannock, slow to anger, but with a steadily mounting temper, said. «Well, by gosh, I'd like to tell that fellow Smith a thing or two!»