Erle Gardner - The Case of the Drowning Duck

Mason gave his attention once more to the magazines. After a few minutes, he said, “Here’s a young woman who ran away. If it hadn’t been for that, the police never would have had anything on her. Strange thing about that desire to get away from something. A person wants to run and doesn’t stop to realize that it’s the worst thing he could possibly do. Let me see what they did with this woman.”

Mason turned the pages of the magazine, said, “She went to Tehachapi for life. That must be rather a terrible thing, a young, good-looking woman suddenly plunged behind the walls. Year after year, she watches herself getting older. When she eventually gets out, her skin is harsh, her hair is gray, her figure is gone. The lightness has left her step. The sparkle isn’t in her eyes. She’s just a dejected, middle-aged...”

“Stop it!” Alberta Cromwell all but screamed at him.

“Pardon me,” Mason said. “I was just talking about the magazine.” He looked at his wrist watch. “Another thirty minutes before the bus is due. I suppose the back door of your apartment opens onto a porch — place for garbage and perhaps a screen cooler. Is there a partition between that and the porch on the adjoining apartment, or is it just a railing?”

“A wooden railing.”

Mason nodded. “Was he perhaps fixing a hot buttered rum for you, and then you — Well, suppose you tell me what happened?”

She compressed her lips in a thin, tight line.

Mason said, “He was expecting this blonde girl from the detective agency when the Los Angeles bus came in. She had a key to the apartment. Probably he didn’t want you to know that.”

“But I did know it,” she blurted. “It was just a matter of business. I knew she was coming.”

“Oh, so he convinced you it was just a matter of business, did he?”

She made no answer.

Mason said, “You mean he tried to convince you, and you pretended that you’d let him.”

She turned, and he could see the torment in her eyes. “I tell you it was business. I knew she was coming down there. Her name’s Sally Elberton. She works for the detective agency where Leslie was employed. Their relationship is purely business.”

“Did you know she had a key?”

“Yes.”

“She must have come sooner than he expected,” Mason said.

She said nothing.

“Did Miss Elberton know about you?”

She started to say something, then checked herself.

“Quite apparently,” Mason said, “she did not. So she came, and you slipped out of the back door, climbed over the rail, and went into your own apartment. I wonder how long it was before you went back.”

She said, “It wasn’t Sally Elberton.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I–I was curious. After a while, I went to the window and watched.”

“And what did you see?”

“I saw him when he left the apartment.”

“Oh, it was a man?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know his name. I’ve never seen him before.”

“What did he look like?”

She said, “I jotted down the license number of his automobile.”

“What is it?”

“I’m not giving out that information.”

“A young man?” Mason asked.

Once more she refused to answer.

Mason said, almost musingly, “Then after he left, you went back to ask Leslie what it was all about. You looked through the little glass window in the back door. Or did you open the door and get a whiff of the gas? You wondered whether to leave the door open, whether — no, wait a minute. That back door must have been locked and the key turned in the lock. He would have done that, so that you wouldn’t have interrupted his tête-à-tête. That’s an interesting thought. If he’d trusted you a little more implicitly, if he’d left the back door unlocked, you might have got it open in time to have saved his life. So then you rushed back to your apartment and came downstairs to try the front door. You found me ringing the doorbell and knew the door was closed and locked. That, I guess, just about covers it.”

She said nothing.

Mason started thumbing through the magazine again. “Well,” he said, “if you can’t talk about crime, we can at least read about it. Here’s a photograph showing...”

With a quick motion of her arm, she knocked the magazine from his hand to the floor, jumped to her feet, and started out of the bus depot. She was almost running by the time she reached the door.

Mason waited until the door of the bus depot had swung shut before he moved; then he picked up the magazines from the floor, placed them in a neat pile on the wooden bench in the waiting room, and walked out.

Della Street wakened as he opened the door of the car. “See her?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Where is she?”

“Gone.”

“Where?”

“Home.”

Della smiled, a sleep-drugged, wistful little smile. “You do have a way with women, don’t you, Chief?”

The train, having stopped briefly to pick up a lone passenger, gathered momentum. Early morning sunlight was touching the snow-capped crests of high mountain ranges on the right. The locomotive, speeding past orange groves laden with golden fruit, whistled intermittently for grade crossings. In the sleepers, Pullman porters were beginning to haul out baggage and pile it in vestibules. In the diner, passengers were thinning out as the train approached the suburbs of Los Angeles.

Mason entered the dining car. Sally Elberton was seated alone at a table for two.

“One, sir?” the dining steward asked, holding up a finger at Mason. “We’ll have just time to serve you.”

Mason said, “Thank you. I’ll sit here,” and walked calmly over to seat himself opposite the young woman.

She kept her eyes on her plate for a moment, then elevated a cup of coffee to her lips, casually glanced at Mason, dropped her eyes back to the plate, then suddenly snapped her eyes back into a startled glance at the lawyer, the coffee cup held motionless in her hand.

“Good morning,” Mason said.

“Why — were you on this train? I didn’t know... You’ve been... south?”

“Just got on a little while ago,” Mason said.

“Oh.” She smiled. “I got on early, myself — been visiting a friend.”

A waiter bent solicitously over Mason’s shoulder. “If you’ll put your order in right away, sir...”

“Just a pot of coffee,” Mason said.

He opened his cigarette case, took out a cigarette, lit it, settled back in the chair with one arm resting lightly on the edge of the table. “Did you get to see him?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Your friend.”

She studied him for a moment as though debating whether to be angry or facetious, then smiled and said, “As it happened, my friend was not a him, but a her.”

“The name wouldn’t by any chance have been Milter?” Mason asked.

This time she decided to freeze him with cold indignation. “I don’t know what gave you that idea in the first place,” she said, “or who gave you the right to inquire into my private affairs.”

“I was just preparing you,” Mason said, “sort of giving you a dress rehearsal.”

“Rehearsal for what?”

“For the questions that are coming later.”

“I can assure you,” she said, her voice coldly formal, “that if anyone has the slightest right to ask me questions I will be able to answer without any assistance, Mr. Mason.”

Mason moved back slightly so that the waiter could bring his coffee. He handed the waiter a dollar bill, said, “Get the check, pay it, keep the change,” shifted his position slightly, waited until the grinning waiter had retired, and then asked quite casually, “Was Milter alive or dead when you called?”