Эрл Гарднер: The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom

“A beautiful redhead, with the bluest of blue eyes, Mason. You can look right down into the depths. The fair, delicate skin that goes with a redhead of that type. Hang it, she’s beautiful! She’s a gem. She’s a marvel.”

Mason broke in, “I get it. While we’re on the subject of women, do you by any chance have a woman in your employ about twenty-three or twenty-four, with a good figure, trim, slim-waisted, long-legged, high-breasted, blond hair, gray eyes...”

“In my employ!” Garvin said. “Good Lord, Mason, you make her sound like a Hollywood movie actress!”

“She’s good-looking,” Mason admitted.

Garvin shook his head. “Don’t know anyone.”

“Know anyone by the name of Colfax?” Mason asked.

Garvin thought. “Yes,” he said, “I had a business deal at one time with a man by the name of Colfax, some sort of a mining deal. I can’t remember much about it. I have a lot of things on my mind. However, I wanted to talk to you about my first wife.”

“Go ahead.”

“Well,” Garvin said, “we separated about a year ago. Now, there was something strange about that separation. My wife and I hadn’t been getting along too well and I’d been — well, I’d been turning to other interests, staying at the club a lot, playing a little poker, going out with the boys. But my wife was not sitting home, pining her life away... Hang it, Mason, we’d just reached the point where we’d started to grow apart. Frankly, she bored me and I suppose I bored her. Anyway, when the separation came there were no hard feelings, no tears shed. It was just a plain business matter. I gave her a mine in New Mexico that looked pretty good.”

“Any formal property settlement drawn up?” Mason asked.

“Now, on that I admit I made a little mistake. I didn’t have it formal, but Ethel had always been pretty square that way. We talked things over and I gave her this mine and we were going to see how it turned out. If it turned out all right, she was going to take that as a complete property settlement; if it didn’t turn out so good, I told her we’d make some sort of an adjustment.”

“And did it turn out good?”

“I think it was all right,” Garvin said, “but the point is Ethel went out to New Mexico, stayed at the mine for a while, then wrote me she was going to Nevada to get a divorce. Then after a while I heard in a more or less roundabout way that she had a divorce.”

“A letter from her?”

“From one of our mutual friends.”

“You’ve saved that letter, and the letter from your wife?”

“Unfortunately I haven’t.”

“Did she get a divorce in Reno?”

“Apparently not.”

“Tell me the rest of it.”

“Well, I met Lorraine Evans.” His face lit up with a fatuous smile. “I can’t begin to tell you about Lorrie, Mason. It was just like turning back the hands of the clock. She has everything that I’d expected to find in Ethel when I first married her. Hang it, I still can’t believe my good fortune.”

“I know. She’s a gem! She’s a dream! But now let’s get on with it,” Mason said impatiently.

“Well, I hadn’t bothered about records before, but after I met her and — well, I wanted to be sure I was free, so I wrote to Reno and tried to find records of my wife’s divorce, and apparently there weren’t any.”

“Then what?”

“Well,” Garvin said uncomfortably, “I’d acted on the assumption, of course, that there had been a divorce in Reno, particularly after receiving that letter from our friend about Ethel’s divorce.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, I... I tell you, Mason, I’d naturally acted on the assumption I was a free man and...”

“What did you do?” Mason asked.

“Well, I’d gone pretty damn far by the time I found out that there was some question about a Reno divorce... I still thought that there was a divorce there, all right, but that the records were missing or something.”

“So what did you do?” Mason asked.

“Well,” Garvin said, “I went down to Mexico and had a talk with a lawyer there who told me I could establish a residence by some sort of proxy and — well, he made it sound pretty good. Anyway, I got a Mexican divorce and Lorrie and I were married afterwards in Mexico. We followed a procedure worked out by a lawyer in Mexico. He seemed to know his business.”

“And then what happened?” Mason asked.

“Well,” Garvin said, “I’m worried about Ethel. She’s — she’s suddenly turned bitter. She wants a property settlement. She wants things that would completely ruin me. She wants — me!”

“And so,” Mason said, “you find yourself with two wives on your hands?”

“Well,” Garvin said, stroking his heavy jaw, “I hoped it wouldn’t come to that, Mason. I’d rather be a happy bridegroom than a dubious one. I hoped that Mexican divorce would be good. I wanted to find out something about it.”

Mason said, “I’ll look into your Mexican divorce. Where’s your wife now?”

“She’s right here, in the city somewhere, but I don’t know where. She telephoned me from a pay station. She won’t give me her address.”

“She has a lawyer?”

“She says she’s going to handle the property settlement by herself.”

“Doesn’t want to pay a lawyer’s fee?” Mason asked.

“No,” Garvin said, “she’s smarter than any two lawyers in the country — present company excepted, of course. The woman’s damned clever. She was my secretary before I married her, and believe me, she certainly knows her way around when it comes to business — a smart woman.”

“All right,” Mason said, “I’ll see what I can do. It’s going to cost you money.”

“I expected that.”

“By the way,” Mason said, “your present wife — was she down at your office last night?”

“Down at the office? My wife? Heavens, no!”

“I thought I saw a light up there,” Mason said. “I was looking out of the window, and I noticed light striking the upper landing of the fire escape. I believe your office is directly above mine.”

“That’s right, it is,” Garvin said, “but you couldn’t have seen a light in my office. It must have been in the office up above that, Mason. No one works in my office at night.”

“I see,” Mason said. “Well, I’ll look into it. Go into that other office and dictate all the data to Miss Street. Give her all the names, addresses, descriptions, anything else you can think of. And leave a check for a thousand-dollar retainer. We’ll get busy on it.”

It was mid-afternoon when Paul Drake entered Mason’s office, walking with a loose-jointed gait that gave him the appearance of extreme indolence.

“Hi, Perry.”

“How are you, Paul? You certainly don’t look the romantic picture.”

“What do you mean, the romantic picture?”

Mason grinned, “I was thinking of the description I heard a short time ago of the private detective. A young woman was very much thrilled with the glamour of your occupation, but there was a shudder that went along with the thrill.”

“Oh, that,” Paul Drake said in a bored voice as he seated himself in the big client’s chair. “It’s a hell of a job.”

“What have you found out about the Garvin Mining, Exploration and Development Company?” Mason asked.

Drake lit a cigarette, sprawled around in the chair until he had his legs draped over one of the overstuffed arms, the other used as support for the small of his back. “Garvin,” he said, “is an impulsive sort of a guy.”

“In what way?”

“He married his secretary, an Ethel Carter. They got along fine together. Everything was all hunky-dory until the new wore off, and after the new wore off Garvin started looking around.”