Эрл Гарднер - The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom

Garvin opened the door and said, “Well, he’s here, Lorrie.”

“Thank heaven!” she said, and came toward him smiling cordially, giving him her hand. “Mr. Mason, I can’t begin to tell you how much it means to me to have you here. I’ve been worrying and Edward has been simply frantic.”

“Thank you,” Mason said. He presented Della Street to Mrs. Garvin and said, “The stockholders’ meeting and the meeting of the new board of directors is all out of the way. Everything moved along smoothly. There was no trouble at all. I had thought perhaps that there might have been an organized revolt planned, that the substitution of Ethel’s name on those proxies wasn’t simply a piece of isolated, personal skulduggery. I thought that perhaps it might mask something more sinister. As nearly as I could tell from checking the names of the stockholders, there were a lot of stockholders present who weren’t ones that we’d called.

“Della Street called that list you gave her this morning and nearly all of them showed up. I guess there was enough friendly stock there to control the meeting; but, for the life of me, I don’t know why some of those other people showed up. It was a peculiar situation.”

“Anyhow, we can quit worrying about that,” Garvin said. “It probably was all right. Let’s get down to news of this tragedy, Mason.”

Mason said, “I’m going to be blunt about this thing, Garvin. You’re now a widower. That doesn’t affect your status as having committed bigamy when you went through that marriage ceremony in Mexico. I don’t want you to go back to the United States. I know that it may look a little callous for you to stay over here and refuse to go to the funeral of your ex-wife, but nevertheless I want you to play it that way. There are a lot of things I can’t tell you about right now.”

“I want to know the details,” Garvin said. “Good lord, Mason, I’ve been biting my fingernails down to the knuckles. Tell me, how did it happen?”

Mason said, “I had a detective shadowing her. She left her apartment at ten-nineteen. She probably received a telephone call from someone shortly before she left. She ditched my shadow. The next contact we had was when we found her sitting in her car about two miles south of Oceanside on a mesa, a vacant lot. Someone had shot her with a .38 caliber revolver. One shot on the left side of the head.

“Now that .38 caliber revolver is probably the same one that you found out on the fire escape a couple of days ago. I’m going to have to ask you some questions. They’re going to hurt but we’ve got to go through with it. The police are going to ask you those same questions. I want to hear your answers before the police hear them.”

“Go right ahead. Ask anything you want,” Garvin said. “As far as that revolver is concerned...”

“I think I’ve checked up on the revolver pretty well,” Mason said. “What I want to check up on now is you.”

“On me?”

“Yes.”

“What do you mean?”

“Where were you last night?”

“Where was I? Why, you were with me. You drove in here. You went across the border with me. You...”

“You went in your room and then what did you do?”

“I went to bed.”

“You stayed in there all night?”

“Why, yes, of course.”

“Didn’t go out for any purpose?”

“No, certainly not.”

“How about it, Mrs. Garvin?” Mason asked. “Can you swear to that?”

“Why, certainly,” she said indignantly.

“Now, don’t get hot under the collar,” Mason warned. “I’m simply closing the thing up so the police won’t find any loopholes. Now, did you folks go to sleep, say around midnight?”

“Probably before that.”

“Do you sleep soundly?”

“I don’t sleep too soundly,” Garvin said. “My wife is quite a sound sleeper.”

“That’s bad,” Mason said.

“I don’t see anything bad about it,” she said.

“You can’t give him an alibi.”

“I certainly can. As it happens I woke up at — oh, right around one o’clock. Edward was snoring. I told him to roll over on his side. I had to speak to him twice before he did, but he rolled over on his side and then quit snoring. I went back to sleep. I will admit that I sleep very heavily, but at times I’m an intermittent sleeper. I didn’t know anything after that until about half past two or quarter to three. I woke up then and was awake until after quarter past three.”

“How do you know about the time?” Mason asked.

She said, “I heard a clock chime the hour at one o’clock and when I woke up and was awake for about half an hour I not only heard the clock chime three o’clock but I looked at my wrist watch. In fact, I got up and took a glass of water and an aspirin. I had a slight headache and felt a little restless. Then I went back to sleep.”

Mason heaved a sigh of relief and said, “Well, that’s fine. I just wanted to be sure that you had an absolute ironclad alibi. Now let’s get back to the question of that gun...”

“That gun definitely was not in the glove compartment, Mr. Mason,” Lorraine Garvin said. “I looked in there to get some sunglasses for Edward.”

“When was that?”

“Very shortly after we’d left Los Angeles. It had been a little cloudy, and then the sun came out and was quite brilliant and Edward wanted his dark glasses. I opened the door of the glove compartment and the glasses were in a case toward the back of the compartment. Now that you mention about the gun, I remember thinking that everything had been pushed toward the back part of the glove compartment and wondered why. It was as though some other object had occupied the front of the compartment for a little while. But it certainly wasn’t there when I got those glasses. There were just some maps and a small flashlight, a pair of pliers, and this case with Edward’s sunglasses.”

“No gun?”

“Definitely not.”

Mason said to Garvin, “But you’re certain the gun was in the glove compartment?”

“It certainly was, and I guess the only time when it could have been removed was when I was out in front of my house waiting for my wife. She had the baggage all packed and I went in and got the baggage and then...”

“And then we had a bottle of beer,” Lorraine said. “You remember that you wanted to have some beer. You said you were thirsty so we went back to the icebox and had a bottle of beer.”

“That’s right,” Garvin said.

“And during this time the car wasn’t locked up?”

“Heavens, no,” Garvin said. “As a matter of fact I almost didn’t shut off my motor. Lorraine said she had the baggage all ready and I went in and got it and it wasn’t until after I got in the house that I thought about the beer. Lorraine joined me. We went back to the icebox, opened a bottle and split it in two glasses. Now someone could have taken the gun out at that time.”

“Someone who had followed you for that specific purpose?” Mason asked.

“I don’t think so, Mason. I doubt if anyone could have done that. It would have been more apt to have been kids in the neighborhood.”

“It wasn’t kids in the neighborhood,” Mason said. “Whoever got that gun, got it for a specific, deliberate purpose. That was the gun that was used in killing your former wife.”

“They’re absolutely certain about that?” Garvin asked.

“They will be as soon as they recover the fatal bullet and then shoot a test bullet through the gun and make a series of tests with a comparison microscope. But you can gamble a thousand to one that it was that gun which did the job.”

“That, of course, complicates things,” Garvin admitted. “I suppose police might even discover my fingerprints on that gun.”