Эрл Гарднер - The Case of the Careless Kitten

They came to a wide place in the road. Mason pulled off, switched off his ignition, cut off the headlights, settled down into the cushions.

“I love the desert,” Mason said after a little while.

Della Street snuggled close. “We supposed to be working on this trip?” she asked.

“Uh huh. I’ve brought that brief along with me. We won’t go back to the office until we’ve finished it.”

She said, “Well, I owe you five dollars. It took that jury three hours and ten minutes to the dot. Chief, I know about the kitten, but what else happened?”

Mason said, “The kitten jumped up on the bed which was supposed to have been occupied by Franklin Shore; then it jumped down and went into the other bedroom and curled up in the middle of the bed which was supposed not to have been occupied by Tom Lunk. The kitten proves Lunk was a liar. The bed in the back bedroom hadn’t been slept in, and was cold. The bed in the front bedroom had been occupied and was warm.

“I don’t know whether you’ve ever thought about it, Della, but if a man has some hiding place which he thinks is safe, he naturally hides everything there. For some time Lunk had been putting the money he’d collected for playing his part in the game into the flour can — a typical hiding place for a crusty old bachelor. Then when he had to hide the gun quickly, he naturally hid it in the same place.”

“Why did he have to hide the gun?”

“Because, dope, after he got to bed, Mrs. Shore telephoned him from the hospital and told him to rush out to the house, crawl in through the window, and get the gun out of the desk. She suddenly realized police were going to search the place. It’s a wonder they hadn’t found it when they made the first search, but at that time Tragg was concentrating on the medicine cabinet and looking for poison.”

“I wish you’d tell me the whole story.”

Mason said, “Somebody poisoned the kitten. It was an inside job. The kitten hadn’t been out of the house. Komo might have done it, but he had no motive. The reason suggested by Lunk that he was trying out the poison was cockeyed because the kitten had been given such a large dose.

“You can figure out what happened. Mrs. Shore had a telephone call in the afternoon. After that call, she decided the time had come to commit the murder she’d planned so long and so carefully. She was tired of paying blackmail. She had to get Helen out of the house for some length of time, so Helen wouldn’t know she was away from home. She knew that if she could poison the cat, Helen would dash madly to a veterinary hospital. Gerald came in unexpectedly, but he went along with Helen, of course. Then she sent Komo out to get some stout. With the coast clear, she took Franklin Shore’s old gun, got into the car, and went up to the reservoir above Hollywood where Leech was waiting by appointment to collect another installment of blackmail. She paid the last installment with a .38 caliber bullet, came back, put the gun in the desk. She realized that suspicion might attach itself to her, so she poisoned the stout in the icebox, pretended she had symptoms of poisoning, and was rushed to a hospital. That helped direct suspicion even more toward Franklin Shore. It didn’t occur to her until after Tragg showed up that police would make a thorough search of the house. She realized then they’d find the gun. Police had her sewed up in the hospital, so she rushed through a telephone call to Lunk, and told him to go out and get the gun.

“Lunk was her accomplice. She’d groomed and trained him carefully in the details of what he had to do. All she had to do that afternoon was call him up after she heard from Leech and tell him to go ahead.”

Della objected, “But I thought Franklin Shore hadn’t told Matilda or anyone about Helen’s getting tight on the punch or rescuing the—”

Mason laughed. “Lunk, pretending to be Franklin Shore on the telephone, told Helen he hadn’t said anything to Matilda.”

Della said, “Well, I’ll be... So Lunk came up to the house to get the gun — and shot to keep from being caught doing it.”

“Yes. He crawled through the window, upset a night stand, and thinking fast — no fool, Lunk — tried to cover up by making sounds as though Mrs. Shore were walking across the room. He hobbled over to the desk, got the gun, and was just getting over toward the window when Jerry Templar opened the door and started to turn on the light. He fired a couple of shots, dropped to the ground, and then beat it back to his shack, probably in his car.

“Lunk was lying about not having gone to bed. He had been in bed when Matilda telephoned. When he went back to the shack, he hid the gun in the flour. Then he turned down the bed in the back bedroom, lay in it long enough to wrinkle the sheets, planted the cigar butt, then dumped the things out of the bureau drawer, and out of the closet. He took a street car to go back to the Shore house, hoping the police would pick him up and question him. Reluctantly he’d tell the story Matilda had cooked up about Franklin Shore turning up at his shack. The police would high tail it over there, and find all the planted evidence that Shore had been there but flown the coop after robbing Lunk. Of course, Lunk never expected they’d search the flour can. That was his own, particular secret hiding place... and they wouldn’t have searched it either if it hadn’t been for me.”

“How do you know all this?” she asked.

“The kitten’s actions show conclusively that the bed in the front room was warm. The one in the back room wasn’t. That is the key clue to the whole business. Lunk got up out of bed. The bed was warm. The kitten climbed in that bed. Lunk came back to hide the gun and the kitten got in the flour, was chased out, went to the bed in the back bedroom, jumped up on it, found it was cold, remembered the warm bed in the front room where it had previously been lying, and went back there to curl up and go to sleep. Lunk went out with his carefully prepared story for the police, expecting to run into them at the Shore residence. You picked him up instead. He wasn’t particularly anxious to tell his story to us because he wanted to tell it to the police yet he had to pretend that he didn’t want to have anything to do with the police. He was afraid I wouldn’t pass it on to the police fast enough, so the minute he was free to do so, he gave an anonymous tip to Lieutenant Tragg over the telephone which resulted in his being picked up.

“Matilda had it planned out to kill a lot of birds with that one .38 slug by making it appear her husband was still alive and had done the job. Incidentally, his being alive — and of course the police would never be able to find him — would keep Gerald Shore and Helen from probating the estate, keep Helen from becoming financially independent, and save forty thousand dollars in legacies.”

“But why did she have Lunk telephone Helen? ”

“Don’t you see? That’s the significant part of the whole business. Helen was the only one who really couldn’t have recognized Franklin Shore’s voice. She was only fourteen when he left. There’s a great difference between fourteen and twenty-four. Lunk could deceive her, where his voice probably would not have deceived Gerald.”

“What about Franklin’s personal belongings in the car beside Leech?”

“Matilda got out some of her husband’s old things and wrapped them up in one of his handkerchiefs and took them out with her. The laundry mark was a giveaway. Franklin Shore wouldn’t have carried the same handkerchief for ten years. The fact that the watch was wound up at around four-thirty shows that that was when Matilda got things ready to go out on her little hunting trip. People don’t wind watches at four in the afternoon. It’s so plain it stands out like a sore thumb.