Erie Gardner - The Case of the Lazy Lover

Drake was talking on the phone as Mason came in.

He motioned the lawyer to a seat, said into the telephone, “Okay, I got it. Now give me that address again.

“All right. No, stay on the job. Just keep an car to the ground and see what you can find out. Telephone anything that looks important.”

Drake hung up the phone and said, “Well, that’s a break. I don’t know how much of a break.”

“What is it?” Mason asked.

“That’s my man down there at headquarters in the pressroom.”

“What’s he found out?”

“The last reports say Fleetwood is still sticking to his amnesia story.”

Mason said, “That’s not a break. That’s something I want to talk with you about, Paul. What else?”

“He went through the motions of just having regained his memory, and called his girl friend.”

“Did your man get her number?”

“Her name, telephone number and address.”

“What’s her name?”

“Bernice Archer.”

“Her name hasn’t entered the case. What about her?”

“Oh, he just called her to tell her that he’d been suffering from a lapse of memory, that the police told him he’d been holed up at the ranch of a man named Overbrook, that he’d just regained his memory, and that under no circumstances was she to pay any attention to anything she might hear about him, until he had an opportunity to explain things to her.”

“What sort of a conversation was it?” Mason asked. “Was it difficult, do you know?”

“How do you mean?”

“Was the girl throwing a fit?”

“No. Apparently it was just a routine conversation. He called her, talked to her and then hung up.”

Mason frowned, then said, “That doesn’t seem right, Paul.”

“Why not?”

Mason said, “Suppose you’re a guy’s girl friend. Every one of your friends knows that he’s going with you. Now all of a sudden, the fellow takes a run-out powder. Apparently he’s run away with a married woman. You don’t hear anything from him. Then out of a clear sky, he rings up and says, ‘Listen, sweetheart, don’t believe anything you hear about me. I’ve had a lapse of memory. I’ll be up to see you as soon as I can.’ Well, that just isn’t right.”

“You mean the girl friend would throw hysterics?”

“She’d probably raise hell. There would be tears and recriminations, and then she would wind up with the question, ‘Well, do you love me? Well, tell me you love me. Well, tell me this other woman was nothing in your life.’ You know, all that sort of stuff.”

“Could be, all right,” Drake said.

“Of course,” Mason went on, “I’m having troubles of my own, Paul, and I’m looking for loopholes everywhere.”

“What’s happening?”

Mason said, “My client tells me a story that’s probably okay. She swears it is. It’s a story that could stand up, if it had just the right props, but it’s a story that could fall down mighty easy.”

“Well?”

“Now this man, Fleetwood,” Mason said, “is in a spot. He pulled this amnesia business, and I managed to get him into the hands of the police before he’d had an opportunity to do too much thinking about it. Right now, he’s stuck with the murder of Bertrand Allred. He was the last man to see him alive, and he can’t deny that he killed him, because he doesn’t know anything at all that happened.

“Obviously, a man as shrewd as Fleetwood is not going to let himself be placed in that position without trying to do something about it. The only thing that he can do is to come out and admit that all this amnesia business was a stall, that he remembers everything.”

“The minute he does that, he’s put himself in a hell of a fix,” Drake said.

“I know that,” Mason said, “and that’s the thing that I’ve been counting on as a prop to help hold up Mrs. Allred’s story — but a great deal is going to depend on what he says when he starts telling the truth.”

Drake shook his head. “If he took Mrs. Allred’s car, then he was the last person to see her husband alive. If he gives a load of this amnesia business to the police, and through them to the newspaper boys, and finally weakens and says that he knew what was going on all the time, it doesn’t make such a hell of a lot of difference what his story is. I think his best move is to sit tight on the amnesia, regardless of how much it hurts.”

“It might be, at that,” Mason said, “and we don’t want him to do what’s good for him. We want him to do what’s good for my client. We’ll force his hand. I think that he’ll start telling the truth about the amnesia, and when he does he’ll tell a story that will have been carefully thought out.”

“It’ll have to be quite a story, Perry.”

“Well, he may be just the boy who can think one up. I’d like to force his hand, Paul. I’d like to make him tell his story before he’s ready to tell it. I want to make things so hot for him, he’ll start squirming and twisting.”

“How would you go about doing that?”

“I think the first place to start might be his girl friend.”

“Want to go out there first thing in the morning, and...”

“Why not go out there now?”

Drake made a little shrugging gesture with his shoulders.

Mason said, “What is it? An apartment house, Paul?”

“Uh huh.”

Mason said, “She’s had a phone call from Fleetwood. She’s awake. She’s probably curious. Let’s go out and have a talk with her.”

“Okay by me,” Drake said. “I just swigged about a gallon of coffee, and won’t be able to sleep tonight, anyway. I thought you’d probably have enough stuff to keep me going all night.”

“That’s fine,” Mason said. “We’ll drive out in your car. You have the address?”

“Right.”

“Let’s go.”

They left the office, entered Drake’s car, and Mason immediately settled back against the cushions, put his head on the back of the front seat and closed his eyes.

“Tired?” Drake asked.

“I’m just trying to think,” Mason told him. “This isn’t an ordinary case where you don’t know what happened or how it happened. This is a case where the District Attorney is going to have to prosecute one of two persons for murder. One or the other of those persons simply has to be guilty as the facts now stand. If my client is lying, she may be guilty. If she is, I’m simply going to represent her to the best of my ability and let it go at that, but if Fleetwood is guilty and he is trying to blame it on my client, I’m going to try and outwit him.”

It was some fifteen minutes later that Drake eased his car to a stop in front of an apartment house. “This is the place,” he said. “We’ll probably have to drive a couple of blocks in order to find a parking space. It’s pretty well cluttered up with automobiles.”

Mason said, “Looks like a place across the street there. That’s a fire plug.”

“How about it?”

“Sure,” Mason said, “provided you can park and still leave access to the plug in case there should be a fire.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Drake told him. “In case there’s a fire these boys get to the fire plug all right. It’s kind of tough on your automobile, but they get there. I saw one car that had been left locked in front of a fire plug. There was a fire and the fire department just chopped a hole in both sides of the car, put the hose right through and went to work. When the owner came back, he had a car with a tunnel chopped through it and tickets for overtime parking and tickets for parking in front of a fire plug.”

“Probably cured him,” Mason said. “Wait a minute, Paul. That man looks as though he’s going to get in a car and drive away. If he has a parking place... there he is, unlocking that Dodge. Hey, Paul, drive on past, fast!”