Erle Gardner - The Case of the Borrowed Brunette

Della Street looked up with surprise, her eyebrows raised interrogatively.

“Now,” Mason said, “let’s devise a code that no one can decipher!”

“I thought experts could decipher any code.”

“They can,” Mason answered with a grin, “provided the code means anything! You, Della, will fill the rest of that sheet of social stationery with letters and numbers, all mixed together and broken up into words containing five characters each. See that there are both numbers and letters in each word. And when you finish it, sign the letter ‘Mae’ and bring it in to me.”

“No last name?”

“No last name — just ‘Mae.’ ”

“Chief, what in the world are you doing? It’s manufacturing evidence that will put your neck in a noose!”

“Exactly,” Mason said. “When you have written the letter, go to the bank and get me seven hundred and fifty dollars in cash. And,” he warned as Della started for the door, “be sure to see that the handwriting in the letter is unmistakably feminine.”

“Any particular type of stationery?” Della asked.

“I think Mae would buy a box of pale-rose or something of that sort; and don’t forget the perfume!”

“I won’t,” she promised. “I’ll get started right now.” And she left the office.

A few minutes later Paul Drake’s code knock sounded on the door of Mason’s private office. The lawyer crossed over to open it.

“Hello, Paul, what’s new?”

“Lots of things,” Drake said. “When I got to my office I found a collection of stuff.”

“Important?”

“I think it’s damned important, Perry.”

Drake crossed over to the big overstuffed chair, slid into his favorite position, his legs dangling over one of the arms, his back propped against the other.

“Now here’s a funny one,” Drake said. “I got this right from headquarters and I’m darned if I know what it means.”

“Shoot.”

“You know that the banks these days are-quietly keeping a record of all large bills passed out. They don’t say much about it, but when a man asks for big bills the bank keeps a record. Not ostentatiously, of course. For instance, the hundred-dollar bills in a drawer are listed by their serial numbers. A man who wants ten hundred-dollar bills gets the top ten — and after he’s left the bank the cashier makes a note of the top ten numbers on the list, and that’s that. They’ve got a record of who has those particular bills.”

Mason nodded.

“Now in that wallet of Hines’s,” Drake went on, “there were twenty-one hundred-dollar bills. I don’t think the police have yet traced the history of all of those bills, and probably they never will, because the bills came from various sources. But the point is that five of them, Perry, came from Orville L. Reedley.”

“The devil they did!”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well,” Mason commented, “when you stop to figure that angle of it, I guess... Say, Paul, let’s check up on this Reedley boy. Let’s find out where he was at the time the murder was committed. After all, you know, he’s supposed to be insanely jealous and—”

“He’s absolutely in the clear. Police have already checked on him up one side and down the other. He had lunch that day with the local manager at the Interstate outfit. He went back to the office with this manager and was there until around two-thirty, blocking out a strategy by which he hoped to trap his wife. Incidentally, Perry, I think the guy had begun to smell a rat. I think Helen Reedley was having her double put on too good an act. That chaperone business was too good to be true.”

Mason said, “Well, there must have been some connection between Hines and Reedley.”

“That’s what the police figure. They’re giving Reedley a shakedown. As soon as they get done, I’ll find out just what they’ve discovered.”

“But why should Orville Reedley pay money to Hines? There’s only one answer to that, Paul: it must have been because Hines was giving Helen Reedley a double-cross. But there’s no evidence of that. There’s — Wait a minute, Paul, I’ve got it!”

“What?”

“Don’t you remember? Reedley’s a gambler. He’s been doing a little gambling, and it was at a poker game that he broached the subject of the detective agency. Well, Hines also is a gambler. Hang it, Paul, Hines must have been sitting in on that poker game when Reedley asked that question. And yet Reedley isn’t supposed to know Hines... That money must have changed hands in a poker game and found its way into Hines’s pocket.”

“How?” Drake asked.

“Wait a minute,” Mason said. “I’m beginning to get the picture now. That gambler friend of Helen Reedley’s... ”

“What about him?”

“Probably in love with her. Remember that Helen got Hines to rig up the double for her, but she didn’t tell him why. The gambler tipped Helen off to the probability that her husband’s detectives were going to be on the job, but he also wanted to know why. So he probably hired Hines to do a little snooping for him, and the money with which he paid Hines was, ironically enough, money that had been lost to him in a poker game — lost by Orville Reedley!”

Drake nodded. “That does it, all right, Perry. When you stop to think, it’s logical enough.”

“That’s probably the way it was. When did Reedley get those bills at his bank?”

“About a week ago. Went in and cashed a check for five thousand dollars — wanted it all in hundreds. The bank has a pretty good idea what he does with it. Of course, the explanation of the listing of the numbers is that the Government is trying to get information about the black market, and about the boys who are evading the income tax. Reedley has a clear record. But the bank took the numbers of those bills simply because the drawer with the hundred-dollar bills in it had already been arranged and the list was right there. So that’s it, Perry.”

Mason nodded in assent, but Drake had not quite finished.

“Now,” Paul went on, “let’s give the police a run-around on this. Orville Reedley can’t tell them how Hines got those bills, because in the first place he doesn’t know, and in the second he’d be afraid to even if he did know.”

“Why afraid?”

“He lost them gambling,” Paul explained. “Suppose he tells the officers that. Then the officers say, ‘O.K., who were you gambling with? Give us the names.’ ”

“Boys who start tattling on these big gamblers,” Mason said, “aren’t very good life-insurance risks.”

Drake nodded.

“So,” Mason went on, “you’re quite right. We’ll give Orville L. Reedley to the police as a nice red herring. You say his present flame is Daphne Gridley?”

“As nearly as we can tell.”

“See that the cops get a tip on that, too.”

“You’ve already sent his wife off on a hot scent.”

Mason grinned. “Start the cops on it as well. The success of a red herring, Paul, depends on choosing one who just might be suspect—”

“Okay, Perry, we’ll toss Reedley to the wolves.”

“What else have you got?”

“I don’t suppose it makes any difference, but I’ve identified that boy friend of Helen Reedley’s that she was so touchy about.”

“Who is he?”

“Chap by the name of Arthur Clovis.”

“How in the world did you get a line on him, Paul?”

“Through those telephone numbers on the pad that Frank Holt picked up.”

“Say, wait a minute, Paul. You say the number was on that pad?”

“That’s right.”

“And that pad was in Carlotta Tipton’s apartment?”

“Uh-huh.”

“By the telephone that Hines used?”