Эрл Гарднер - The Case of the Smoking Chimney

The district attorney ostentatiously wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Woman,” he said, “you’re making my mouth water so I’m about to drown. Go get that strawberry shortcake ready, and quit pulling a Gramp Wiggins on me.”

She said: “I sit right here until you give me the low-down on that Pressman case. Don’t think that any husband of mine is going to hold out on a murder case and get away with it.”

“It isn’t ready to close yet. We still have some work to do on it.”

“Tell me what you know, and quit stalling.”

“You didn’t used to be like this.” Duryea laughed.

“I know. It’s the Wiggins in me. Gramps hangs around here and brings out all the worst that’s in me. I was almost becoming a Duryea, and now that horrible Wiggins streak has come to the surface. But, that’s just the way it is. No information, no shortcake.”

“All right.” Duryea surrendered. “I’ll tell you.”

“And tell me all of it. Don’t hold out anything.”

Duryea said: “We’ll start with the gun. There’s a methodical, regular way of tracing guns, although it would never do to tell one of the gifted amateurs like your grandfather a thing like that.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, he doesn’t go in for the painstaking routine steps which point toward success. He wants some subtle clue to follow or something like that.”

“I get you. The way the gun’s clasped in the dead man’s hand, for instance.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, what about the gun?”

“The gun,” Duryea said, “is an old one. It was manufactured twenty-seven years ago. It was sold to a dealer in Butte, Montana. The dealer sold it to a cattleman who is now dead. We located this man’s widow. She remembered that he had such a gun of which he was very proud, and that he had sold it to some dude from California. She couldn’t remember the dude’s name.

“We then started a methodical investigation to find if any of the men who might possibly be connected with the case had ever had any contact with this cattleman.”

“Well,” Milred asked, her eyes sparkling with excitement, “did you have any luck?”

Duryea cocked his eyebrow at her quizzically. “You,” he announced, “are getting worse than Gramps.”

“But it’s so darned interesting, Frank. It’s a chase.”

“It’s a darn chore,” he said. “Just a lot of things you have to run down in a regular, methodical manner.”

“All right, have it your own way, but tell me the answer. What did you find out?”

“We found,” he said, “that a Pellman Baxter of Los Angeles had been on a neighbouring dude ranch, and we found that a ‘Pelly’ Baxter was a close friend of Pressman. Naturally, we started investigating Baxter.”

“When was it he was up at the dude ranch?”

“About five years ago.”

“And this cattleman has been dead how long?”

“Three years... Well, that’s all there was to it. The cattleman’s widow remembered the name of Baxter when we called it to her attention, remembered all about Pelly Baxter, and remembered he’d bought the gun.”

“Then what?”

“Then we moved in on Baxter. He remembered the gun distinctly, and said he’d bought it for a friend.”

“And the friend?” she asked.

“Pressman.”

“He’d given it to Pressman?”

“Yes. He said he knew Pressman was very much interested in a gun of that particular type, and he’d given it to him as soon as he got back from Montana, and had forgotten all about it, completely dismissed it from his mind until we called it to his attention... It seems Baxter is quite a collector of firearms; has revolvers, rifles, shotguns of ancient and modern vintage hung up on the walls of his den, in his library — in fact, all over his place.”

“Married?” Milred asked.

Duryea laughed. “What’s that got to do with it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I was just wondering. You mentioned his house.”

“No,” Duryea said. “He isn’t married. He’s a bachelor, quite a sportsman, keeps a house so he has room for his various possessions, says he can’t stand to be cramped, and doesn’t like apartments.”

“Then you think it was really suicide?”

“What makes you ask that?”

“It being Pressman’s gun.”

Duryea smiled. “We discounted the suicide theory almost at the start.”

“Well, if he was killed with his own gun—”

“That,” Duryea said, “opens an interesting possibility. We made a quiet investigation of Mrs. Pressman. She’s in the thirties. He was in the fifties. They’d been married five years. He devoted virtually all his attention to his business. You can appreciate how a younger wife would feel about that.”

“May I quote you on that?” she asked.

Frank laughed.

She said: “Go ahead, elaborate on that theme some more. I don’t care anything about the solution of the case now. Just keep telling me about what happened in the Pressman household.”

Duryea said: “I’m afraid I can’t give you any of the spicy, salacious details, so dear to the heart of a woman.”

“Why not?”

“It’s all cut-and-dried, all the same old methodical routine pattern.”

“And what’s the pattern?”

“Well,” Duryea said, “we enlisted the aid of the butler, a man who apparently was very much attached to Mr. Pressman. We explained to him what we were looking for, and he made a careful search of the house.”

“What were you looking for?”

“A newspaper with certain phrases cut out of it — three phrases, to be exact — which were pasted together to form a message that was intended as a suicide note.”

“Did he find that paper?”

Duryea nodded wearily. “In the glove compartment of her car.”

“And what happens next?”

“Oh, it means another disagreeable legal chore. I’ve notified Mrs. Pressman to come up here tomorrow morning. The sheriff and I will interview her.”

“Will that be what they call a third degree?”

“It will follow the same old routine pattern,” Duryea said. “We’ll be very courteous and sympathetic. We’ll get her to tell her story over and over. We’ll look for some little discrepancy in it. We’ll ask her about her domestic life, let the questions get more and more personal until she gets really angry... The same old sparring match. She’ll be frightened, desperate, and hopeful by turns. She’ll mix in a few falsehoods with the truth, try to move us with tears, become indignant when we crowd her, make more and more slips, then get rattled, and finally probably break down and tell us the whole story.”

“You make it sound very disagreeable and unromantic,” Milred said.

“I hate to spar with people when their lives are at stake... Although probably her life isn’t at stake.”

“Why not?”

“Women with beautiful figures never get the death penalty.”

“Is that all?” Milred asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Are you holding out anything else?”

“Oh, just the usual incidentals,” Duryea said somewhat wearily.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Oh, the usual wild-and-woolly clues.”

“Now just what is a wild-and-woolly clue?”

“All the anonymous tips, and things of that sort.”

“You act as though there were hundreds of them.”

“Sometimes it seems that way... Notice that when an airplane is lost dozens of people will come forward to tell of seeing mysterious lights in the mountains, hearing planes flying overhead, hearing crashes, and seeing mysterious flares in the night sky.”

“Yes,” she said, suddenly thoughtful. “I’d never realized before just how many of them there are.”