Эрл Гарднер - The Case of the Smoking Chimney

“Yes,” Lassen admitted. “I guess there’s something in that.”

“Tell you what, Pete. Have you got someone you can trust, some deputy on duty that’s immediately available?”

The sheriff nodded.

Duryea walked over to the courthouse window, looked down at the parking space, said: “He’s left his car and trailer out at my place. Get your deputy to rush out there and shadow him. If he’s planting evidence, he’ll go out to that shack before midnight. If he goes out there, I want to know about it. We’ll catch him red-handed, and then I’ll teach him a real lesson.”

“We’d better handle this kinda quietly,” the sheriff said. “You can’t throw your own relative in jail.”

“The hell I can’t,” Duryea said with emphasis.

Pete Lassen gently shook his head.

“Why not?”

“Not with the fight against the courthouse ring that’s going on in this county. You put one of your relatives in jail for tampering with evidence, and by the time the voters got done with us, we’d both be laughed out of office.”

Duryea’s face held an expression of angry futility. “Okay,” he said. “Get your deputy on the job. At least, I can scare him to death.”

Harry Borden, the deputy assigned by Sheriff Lassen to “keep an eye” on Gramp Wiggins, telephoned in his first report about forty minutes after Gramps had left the district attorney’s office.

“This party I’m shadowing,” he reported to the sheriff, “has a jane in the car with him. She was parked in his trailer, keepin’ under cover.”

“Describe her,” Lassen asked.

“You don’t need a description,” Borden said. “She’s the one who was up here answering questions the other night, that snappy-looking number from Los Angeles. I’ve been trying to think of her name.”

“You don’t mean Pressman’s secretary?” Lassen asked.

“No. Wait a minute... I’ve got it now. Eva Raymond.”

“What’s the old man doing?” Lassen asked.

“Right at present,” Borden reported, “Richard Milton, the opposition candidate for district attorney, is making a speech, and the old man has found a parking place for his car and trailer, and is sitting there, taking it all in.”

“Don’t lose sight of him,” Lassen instructed, “and keep an eye open for any violation of the letter of the law. We can’t pinch him, but we’ll throw the book at him on everything from violation of the Mann Act to tampering with witnesses.”

Lassen hung up and reported to the district attorney.

Duryea pushed his hands down deep in his trouser pockets, and then suddenly, as the humour of the situation struck him, he began to chuckle. “ Cherchez la femme ,” he said, “and at his age!”

“It isn’t funny,” Lassen reproached. “It’s serious, damn serious.”

“I know it is,” Duryea said. “That’s what makes it so damned funny.”

Richard Milton was going strong. A fiery glib-tongued courtroom orator of the dramatic school, he rose to heights of forensic eloquence under the hypnotic effect of his own voice. Now, with an interested crowd gathered around the bandstand in Santa Delbarra’s municipal park, Milton raised his voice and inquired: “ What sort of district attorney does this county have? What does he do for his county in return for his salary?

“Let’s answer that question, by looking for a minute at some of the things he does not do.

“Let’s look at Petrie, for instance.”

Milton made dramatic pauses to let his statements soak in. When he saw that the audience was properly receptive, he went on. “He has not protected the property interests of this county. He has not protected the citizens of the Petrie district. Frank Duryea is a lawyer. He’s supposed to know the law. He should have known that this cloud on the title of all that fine citrus property out east of Petrie was a dangerous menace to the welfare of this county. He was in a position to have done something about it.

“Now that oil-drilling has been started, and the citizens of this county are being subjected to legalized blackmail, it’s too late. But for years those oil rights slumbered along quietly. Now I’ll tell you what I’d have done if I’d been district attorney of this county.”

Once more Milton paused, struck an aggressive pose with jaw thrust forward, fist clenched in front of him, a pose which he was using on his campaign posters.

“ I would have had the county assessor quietly boost the assessment on those oil rights until the taxes amounted to more than the persons who held those oil rights wanted to pay. Then a committee of citizens could have gone to the owners of those oil rights and purchased them for a nominal consideration. But what happens? The county authorities organized into an exclusive little courthouse ring, feeling secure in their jobs, drawing their salaries as a matter of routine, avoiding every bit of unnecessary work, going to sleep on the job. In place of having to pay high taxes, the owners of these oil rights find themselves confronted with an ideal situation for their legalized blackmail. They sit tight and do nothing because they don’t have to do anything. The situation drags along until some sharper from Los Angeles buys those oil rights and starts a campaign of legalized blackmail.

“I am not the only one who so characterizes it. Let me read you an editorial from the Petrie Herald .”

The candidate, with a dramatic gesture, whipped a newspaper up from the little table at his side, crackled it open to the editorial page, folded it, and read Everett True’s editorial in a voice which rang out with honest indignation.

Gramp Wiggins, sitting in his car, lit his disreputable pipe, looked across at Eva Raymond, and said: “That bird’s smart. You know it?”

Eva Raymond regarded him with eyes that were half closed in thoughtful calculation. “They say he’s a young attorney with a future,” she said, “—a bachelor.”

“Yep,” Gramps announced. “Reckon that boy’s going places.”

“You think he’ll win the election?”

“Nope.”

“Why not? It sounds like he’s making a good point, and you can tell from the expression on people’s faces that they think so, too.”

“Yep,” Gramps admitted. “It’s a good point.”

“But why isn’t he going to win the election?”

“Because the election is some time off, and I don’t aim to let him win it.”

“ You don’t?”

“Nope.”

“What can you do?”

“Well,” Gramps said, “that’s somethin’ that kinda depends on circumstances... Wonder if he’ll talk about that murder case next... That’s Karper sittin’ up there on the platform with him. Got a big subdivision out there back of Petrie, and he hates Duryea like poison... Believe you said you knew him.”

“Yes, I know him when I see him.”

“I was kinda lookin’ for Everett True,” Gramps said. “Thought he’d be down here. They say he’s keepin’ the paper sorta neutral, but he’s due to come out for Milton a couple of weeks before election. That’s the dope I get. Afraid Duryea ain’t none too popular out there around Petrie.”

Eva Raymond said: “I think he’s wonderful. I’d like to meet him.”

“Duryea?” Gramps asked in surprise.

“No,” she said, nodding her head toward the young orator. “Mr. Milton.”

“Well now,” Gramps said, “that might be arranged.”

She looked at her diamond-studded platinum wristwatch. “Look,” she said, “it’s getting late. You told me that you just wanted me to go out to that cabin and show you exactly where I stood, and—”