Erie Gardner - The Case of the Lazy Lover

“Your Honor, I object,” Danvers shouted. “That question is incompetent, irrelevant, immaterial. It’s not proper cross-examination and...”

“You look at the witness’ face, young man,” Judge Colton said sternly, “and you’ll find that it certainly is competent, relevant and material. The objection is overruled. Now if you want to get at the facts in this case, Mr. Assistant District Attorney, the Court suggests you’d better pay more attention to Mr. Mason’s questions and the answers of this witness. Go ahead, Mr. Overbrook, you answer that question.”

Overbrook squirmed and twisted on the witness stand as though the chair had suddenly become hot.

“Answer the question,” Judge Colton said.

“Well, Your Honor,” Overbrook blurted, “I’ll tell you the truth. In some ways that’s just about what happened. It ain’t true in some respects.”

“In what respects?” Mason asked.

“When I got to the car,” Overbrook said, “I put my flashlight inside and saw this man in there and he was dead, and then I recognized that it was Allred, and I knew that I was in a jam because people knew I hated his guts and it would look as though — well, it would look pretty bad for me having his body found on my property, and this chap that was up there at the house, of course, he could claim that he didn’t know anything about it. Well, I was in a spot. So I took the car and drove her back down to the highway and just shoved her off the cliff, and then I walked back home. I got back about maybe three or four o’clock in the morning. Of course, the dog didn’t make any commotion when I slipped in, and I went to bed.

“And then Tuesday night I got to worrying about the tracks. I knew that sooner or later they’d come up there and start looking for tracks on account of this man Fleetwood having been found up at my place, and particularly after these people came and got him, so — well, you’re right about what happened. I went out there Wednesday and put the boards down and finished making my string of tracks so they looked as though I’d kept right on agoing; and then I told the sheriff I’d made all the tracks Wednesday morning and nobody thought about the dog. The sheriff didn’t think about it, and by gum I didn’t think about it!”

Mason turned to Danvers with a grin and said, “And now, Mr. Danvers, this is your case and your witness. What do you want to do?”

“I want the case continued,” Danvers said.

“Until when?” Judge Colton asked.

“Make it a — oh make it until four o’clock this afternoon, Your Honor.”

“Very well,” Judge Colton said, “and the Court will order this witness into custody. Silence in the court! Will the spectators please cease this uproar! There is no occasion for applause. This is a court of justice. The Court will clear the courtroom... will the spectators please cease applauding!”

Perry Mason, his long legs elevated so that his feet rested on the corner of the desk, tilted back in his swivel chair and grinned at Paul Drake.

“You know, Paul,” he said, “the possible significance of those tracks never occurred to me until after I started studying them at lunch. That’s the bad part of circumstantial evidence. It can really trick you and trap you.

“I told you that Bernice Archer was a smooth individual. Tragg let her talk with Fleetwood up there in the jail, and the minute she knew what had happened she told Fleetwood to insist that Mrs. Allred had been in the luggage compartment of the automobile. She made Fleetwood tell her where the automobile had been parked and she jumped in her car and drove up there and by daylight Wednesday morning she had left tracks which would substantiate Fleetwood’s story. And it was such a cinch to do. All she needed to do was to take any kind of a short pole, walk slowly from the highway out to where the automobile had been parked, then put the pole in the ground to steady her and give her leverage to jump down to a place about where the luggage compartment of the automobile would have been, and then run back to the roadway. When she did that, she didn’t notice Overbrook’s tracks coming out to the automobile and stopping. If she had, she could have pinned the murder on Overbrook right then.”

“Well who the devil did kill him?” Drake asked.

Mason grinned. “Now, Paul, don’t start taking on the duties of the police. It’s up to the police to decide that. The only thing we’re supposed to do is get Mrs. Allred off.”

“Well who do you think killed him?”

Mason said, “When Overbrook went out to investigate on Monday night, he must have had some weapon with him. He evidently didn’t have a gun. He’s a big, strong, powerful giant of a man and he had some sort of a club, probably a jack handle. I have an idea that Allred had regained consciousness by the time Overbrook got there, that he was probably moaning, that Overbrook got in the car, backed it down the roadway and started to go to a doctor, that somewhere along the line he discovered the identity of his passenger and then there were words, accusations and perhaps Allred made a grab at Overbrook. Overbrook cracked him over the head.”

“How do you deduce all this?”

“Because of the blood in the luggage compartment,” Mason said. “No story so far has accounted for that blood. Bernice Archer was smart enough to know that the first person to tell a story that would account for that blood would have the inside track, so she deliberately made up a story for Fleetwood to tell and then went out and made tracks to substantiate that story.

“She was so anxious to have a fall guy for the police that she gilded the lily. But the minute Fleetwood told a story that accounted for the bloodstains and had tracks that would back it up he became the fair-haired boy child of the police.

“If she’d kept out of it, the tracks would eventually have given Fleetwood an out, but she couldn’t realize that. Neither one of them realized what perfect tracking conditions existed at the spot where the car was parked.

“When Bernice went out there she only hoped to be able to make some significant tracks to back up Fleetwood’s story. When she found what she had to work with, she really went to town.

“Now I claim that if that blood didn’t come from Mrs. Allred’s bloody nose, it must have come from a wound in Allred’s head. I think that Overbrook became panic-stricken when he realized what he had done and started to conceal the body by putting it in the luggage compartment. Then he realized that wouldn’t do him any good, and then he got the idea of taking the body out and putting it in the front of the car and driving the car over the grade.”

“Why couldn’t it have been Fleetwood who put the body in there?”

“Because,” Mason said, “Allred weighed about a hundred and seventy-five pounds. Fleetwood is rather a slender chap and not particularly strong. Overbrook is the strong, husky farmer who could have handled a body like that without much trouble. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s up to the police to worry about that. They’ve laid an egg, and they can hatch it.”

Drake chuckled.

“How about the forged check?” Della Street asked.

“That,” Mason said, “is an interesting case of where Allred really outsmarted himself.

“You can see what Allred planned to do. He intended to get Fleetwood out with his wife and then kill them both and run the car over a mountain precipice. He had a perfect scheme there. All he had to do was keep his wife out with Fleetwood until tongues began to wag, and then let the bodies of the guilty lovers be found in the bottom of a deep canyon.

“Now Mrs. Allred wanted me to protect Pat. Her husband didn’t want me messing around in the case. He wanted to have a free hand. He talked her into destroying the letter she had written me, but she was still going to send the check.