Эрл Гарднер - The Case of the Long-Legged Models

“I’ve never seen such an unholy mess in all my life!”

“What do you mean, a mess?”

“I mean a mess. I don’t think this girl had the faintest idea about how the business was handled, or how the files were kept. I have already found duplicate files. I have found correspondence filed in the wrong places. I can’t find any system to the way she handled bills payable.”

“Such as what?” Mason asked.

“Take that apartment house out on Seaforth Avenue, for instance, the one that Mr. Garvin bought just before I left. There have been electrical repair bills on it for over three thousand dollars, and that’s just too darn much.”

“Perhaps television was installed in the different apartments,” Mason said.

“Well, I’m checking on it, but after the way I left things, it’s certainly an Alice in Wonderland situation now.”

“Okay,” Mason told her, “straighten things out the best you can. Keep in touch with me. And tell Garvin I want to see him if he calls in.”

“Should I tell him about the search warrant if he calls in over a public telephone?”

“Sure,” Mason said. “Give him all the information you have.”

“I was thinking that he might be calling on a party line of some sort, or there might be a leak over a public telephone.”

“There’s apt to be a leak over any telephone,” Mason told her. “You have to take that chance.”

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll get busy trying to straighten out the mess up here.”

Mason had hardly hung up the telephone when he heard Paul Drake’s code knock on the corridor door of his private office. He swept open the door, said, “Come on in, Paul.”

Drake said, “Thanks, Perry,” moved over to the client’s chair, sat conventionally for a moment while he was fishing a notebook out of his pocket, then whirled around so that he was sitting crosswise in the chair, one rounded leather arm propped against the small of his back, the other furnishing a rest for his long legs.

“Now this is a hell of a mess, Perry!” he said.

“What?”

Drake said, “I’m afraid you’re in for some unpleasant publicity, Perry.”

“What’s the matter?” Mason asked, raising his eyebrows.

“You know the columnist Jack Crowe who runs the daily column in the paper entitled, ‘Crowe’s Caws’?”

Mason nodded.

“Well,” Drake said, “somebody down at young Garvin’s secondhand car lot came up with a story about you handling a gun that you didn’t think was loaded, and blowing a furrow all the way across the top of young Garvin’s desk.”

Mason looked sheepish. “Good heavens, Paul! Don’t tell me that’s going to get in the papers?”

“Not going to get in the papers!” Drake said. “A choice item like that? Hell! You couldn’t have pulled the job under more auspicious circumstances as far as publicity is concerned, if you had been trying to...”

Drake stopped abruptly.

“What’s the matter?” Mason asked.

Drake regarded Mason thoughtfully. “That was a helluva statement I just made,” he said. “It’s given me a little food for thought.”

“What statement?”

“That if you had been trying to get publicity you couldn’t have done it under more auspicious circumstances. You’re getting the publicity all right... I couldn’t believe the story when I first heard it. I’m beginning to believe it now.”

“I was careless,” Mason admitted.

“Well,” Drake said, “just for your information Crowe got the tip, and he’s printing a humorous article about the lawyer who is so full of technical information about firearms that he can make the ballistic experts look foolish on the witness stand, pulling the ‘didn’t-know-it-was-loaded’ line the minute he gets his hands on a firearm.”

“That would be very, very embarrassing,” Mason admitted.

“That’s what I thought when I first heard it,” Drake commented thoughtfully.

“You’re changing your mind, now?” Mason asked.

Drake’s eyes took on a faraway look as he gazed over toward the windows in unblinking concentration. Abruptly he jackknifed himself up out of the chair.

“What makes you think you can get away with this stuff, Perry?”

“I don’t,” Mason said.

“Then what’s the idea of trying it?”

“It gives the columnists something nice to write about. Having gone that far, Crowe will follow up on the story the next day.”

“Well,” Drake said, “my face is a little red, Perry. I thought I had a hot tip and... Perry, are you certain you haven’t violated the law?”

Mason grinned. “I guess perhaps I have, Paul, but by the time the smoke blows away, discharging a firearm within the city limits is the only thing they can actually hook me on.”

When Mason entered his office on Thursday morning, Della Street had a copy of the morning newspaper placed on his desk. The paper was folded over so as to leave the column entitled, “Crowe’s Caws” in the most visible position.

Mason had just started to read the column when Della Street came in from the outer office.

“Hi, Della,” Mason said. “I gather that I am the subject of a little publicity.”

“Quite a little publicity,” she said.

Mason read:

“Perry Mason, the spectacular trial attorney, whose cases have such a tendency to explode into courtroom pyrotechnics, and who has won many a courtroom battle by proving that his technical knowledge of forensic ballistics is at least the equal of that of the expert whom he is cross-examining, proved to be not quite so adept when it came to handing firearms on a practical basis.

“Seems Stephanie Falkner, the attractive young woman whose father was murdered some time back in a case which so far has never been solved, received some threats which caused Perry Mason considerable concern. Homer Garvin, the high-powered used car salesman, and Stephanie had at one time been quite ga-ga. It is to be presumed that Garvin’s recent marriage terminated the romance, but apparently not the friendship.

“When the noted lawyer called to Homer Garvin’s attention the fact that Stephanie might be in danger, Garvin promptly produced a gun and suggested that Miss Falkner be given an adequate means of protection.

“Perry Mason was all in favor of the deal, and picked up the gun to test the balance, and decide whether the mechanism functioned perfectly.

“It functioned.

“The result was considerable excitement in the offices of the used car dealer, a long deep furrow, ploughed in the veneered desk, and a rather red face on the noted attorney.

“Inasmuch as Mason’s face rarely becomes red, the occasion was considered unique by an interested but somewhat apprehensive audience. However, all’s well that ends well, and, since police have been wondering whether the gun which they found in Stephanie Falkner’s apartment with one exploded shell in the mechanism had been used in connection with a homicide, it gives this column great pleasure to point out that they need look no farther than Homer Garvin’s desk to find the bullet that is missing.

“It was reported that the used car dealer had been planning on having a new desk installed immediately, but as salesmen piloted in a procession of potential customers to view the damages, and the customers somehow affixed their signatures on dotted lines before leaving the place, Garvin has decided to feature the ‘wounded’ desk as his main attraction — sort of a corpus deskus .”

Mason had just finished reading the account in the paper when the telephone on Della Street’s desk jangled.

Della Street answered the telephone, and nodded to Perry Mason. “It’s Paul Drake. He’s coming right down.”