Эрл Гарднер - The Case of the Smoking Chimney

Karper glanced casually at the clock as he lit a cigar. Eleven-fifteen. It was nothing for Karper to sit up until three and four in the morning — scheming, planning, laying traps for his enemies. A cold, mental realist, Karper’s schemes usually paid off. Intensely practical, he had no use for anything which didn’t work.

Now, however, Pressman had Karper in a very tight spot — a very tight spot indeed. He wished that he knew just what Pressman had—

Karper picked up the confidential reports again, reached a decision. In the morning he would call young Harvey L Stanwood and ask him to lunch.

In a ranch house some eight miles outside of Petrie Hugh Sonders lay wide awake.

A night breeze stirred the curtains on the window. The air was scented with eucalypti and orange blossoms, and held that balmy freshness which is of the country. Sonders’ ranch stretched in fertile, well-kept acres — irrigated, cultivated, pruned, neat, orderly. And on a hill, not over a hundred yards from the bedroom window, where Sonders could see its stark outline against the night sky, was an oil derrick... The court had said Pressman had the right to put it there.

Sonders’ hands twitched under the covers. If he only had Pressman by the throat... Steady now! Those thoughts wouldn’t do anyone any good.

Sonders rolled over to his right side so he couldn’t see the window and the silhouette of the oil derrick. His body was tired with that comfortable weariness which comes from work in the open air. Only in the last two months had he had trouble getting to sleep. Now he’d been in bed for an hour — for more than an hour. He looked at the luminous dial of the clock on the stand by the side of his bed — eleven-fifteen.

Everett True, editor of the Petrie Herald , sat at his office desk, a green, celluloid eyeshade pulled down on his forehead. Sheets of flimsy gave him a running account of what was going on in the world... He’d have to crowd the headlines in somewhere. The residents of Petrie were interested in the war, of course.

But the big news, so far as the citizens of Petrie were concerned, lay in the decision of the district court of appeals which had been handed down that afternoon, affirming the decision of Santa Delbarra’s superior court. That old oil reservation actually had teeth in it.

By the court’s decision, the owner of those old rights had the right to enter on the property, to prospect for oil, to build the necessary roads, derricks, sumps, refineries, pipelines — destroying, if necessary, surface improvements.

That old oil reservation, which had been just “a cloud on the title” for years, was now a nightmare. For years no one had even bothered to find out who the owner was. The county assessor had placed only a nominal valuation on the “rights” — just to keep the records straight.

And now they had been bought up by someone who quite evidently meant business — a Ralph G. Pressman of Los Angeles... Strange how hard it was to get photographs of him. He’d always been camera-shy. Even the Los Angeles newspapers couldn’t help out.

Up until three or four months ago, the ranchers could have got together and bought out those oil rights for a song... Strange they hadn’t done it. They’d been sleeping on a legal volcano, and then along came Pressman to blow the lid off. The ranchers had their association now. They’d organized it after the decision of the superior court, after Pressman had put the derrick in on Sonders’ ranch.

Well, that wasn’t getting out a paper... Sometimes there wasn’t any news at all, and you had to make headlines out of bubbles. Now there was so much news you couldn’t get it in the paper. And True had an editorial to write — not for tomorrow’s paper. He’d have to let a lawyer look it over... But he’d have to write it out tonight.

Everett True pulled a movable stand containing a typewriter over to his desk. He ratcheted in a sheet of paper, wrote in capital letters “IS IT LEGALIZED BLACKMAIL?” He glanced mechanically at the clock to see how much time he had before starting the presses.

It was exactly eleven-fifteen.

Sophie Pressman, a woman some twenty years younger than her husband, ran up the front steps of the ornately expensive Pressman residence and fitted a latchkey to the front door. She was in high spirits. For no good reason at all, a little quip flashed through her mind: “Some women,” she thought, “feel more secure with a second string to their bow. I like it when I have a second beau on my string.”

She laughed, glanced mechanically at her wristwatch so that she could, if necessary, tell a convincing story.

It was early. The time was only eleven-fifteen.

It was as she was fitting the key to the lock that she heard the grind of the starting mechanism on a car parked almost directly across the street.

She watched the lights flash on, heard the rhythm of the purring motor, watched the car drive away.

Her high spirits oozed out through her quivering legs, as though a leak in her toes had let all the vitality drain from her body. Several things registered now in a crashing crescendo of dismayed realization — little isolated things which at the time hadn’t meant a thing: the lone man who had been seated at the next table; the car that had locked bumpers with hers; the man in the grey overcoat—

She felt suddenly cold. She turned back toward the door. The icy tips of her fingers fumbled with the latchkey.

Harvey L Stanwood, deep-chested, slim-waisted, looked very attractive in his full-dress suit. Eva Raymond, watching him with proud, possessive eyes, felt that he was fully as handsome as any of the movie stars she had seen on the screen.

There was a certain dash about young Stanwood. The atmosphere of success — the aura of romance — clung to him and filled Eva with a heady intoxication.

Harvey Stanwood’s eyes were just bad enough to get him out of the draft, but they were eyes that didn’t miss a thing. As Ralph G. Pressman’s auditor and bookkeeper, he had access to figures which might not have meant much to the ordinary plodder, but to Stanwood’s chain-lightning brain they meant a lot... And Stanwood capitalized on that knowledge. He knew what was going on. Occasionally he cut himself a piece of cake.

Eva Raymond was nobody’s fool, herself. Eva had been on her own ever since she was seventeen. She liked excitement, white lights, and the feeling of gambling with life. She detested the idea of routine drudgery in an office job. She refused to be pushed ever deeper into a daily rut of routine. Eva Raymond wanted action — and got it.

Harvey Stanwood had been winning consistently earlier in the evening, but now the wheel was going against him. Eva noticed a peculiar thing about Harvey’s gambling. When luck was coming his way, his bets were moderately and conservatively placed, but when his luck started going the other way, he began plunging, making big bets, pyramiding, pushing out money recklessly.

Eva had been around gambling tables a lot. She had known some really expert gamblers. She knew that the way to gamble was to plunge heavily when things were coming your way, and to draw in your horns when the tide turned... Somewhere in the back of her mind she debated whether she should tell Harvey Stanwood about that... It was dangerous. Harvey was very conceited. He loved to tell her how to do things, give her little hints on her manners, on her English, on her appearance. If she should reverse their roles, it might not go so well... And then there was the embarrassing question of explaining to him how she had acquired this secret of the gambling fraternity. Stanwood was jealously possessive.