Erle Gardner: The Case of the Borrowed Brunette

“Well,” the foreman asked, “what’s wrong with that reasoning?”

“Everything,” Mason said. “It isn’t any of it true. The gun was found buried under garbage. Adelle Winters certainly didn’t push it down into the garbage; yet no garbage was put in after the gun was deposited there. Just consider what that means.”

“It doesn’t mean a thing,” Gulling said.

“Yes, it does,” Mason said sharply. “It means that somebody — somebody not Adelle Winters — pushed that gun way down into the garbage because that somebody recognized the possibility that more garbage might have been deposited since the time when Adelle Winters had been seen looking inside. It means, therefore, that some person must have taken the gun out of the garbage can, used it, and put it back — and in putting it back pushed it well down into the garbage.

“Furthermore, it means that the person was somebody who knew that Adelle Winters had been seen at that spot. So far as I know, only two persons knew this. One of them is the detective, Tom Folsom; the other is the man who employed the Interstate Investigators to shadow Adelle Winters — Orville Reedley.”

“Reedley has a perfect alibi for the time when the murder was committed — if that’s what you’re getting at,” Gulling said.

“The time when you think the murder was committed,” Mason corrected. “The time at which the murder was actually committed was some half-hour later than that. Orville Reedley, sitting in the office of the detective agency, got the report that Adelle Winters had left the apartment, had gone directly to the Lorenzo Hotel, had gone to a garbage can and raised the lid. He was curious to learn whether she had put anything into the garbage can. He left the agency’s office, went at once to the hotel — using the alley entrance so as to be safe from observation — and found she had put a gun in the garbage.

“He wondered why Adelle Winters had left the apartment and taken pains to hide a gun so promptly. He took the gun and went up to investigate, knowing that both women were then out of the place. Evidently he had a pass-key he’d got hold of for just such a chance.

“Well, you can see how it looked to Reedley. There was Hines sitting in the bedroom in his shirt sleeves, making himself entirely at home. And remember — Reedley thought that the detectives were following his wife, and that the substituted brunette was the woman with whom he was madly in love. He had a gun in his pocket, and the thought must have suddenly flashed through his mind that, if he pulled the trigger on that gun and eliminated his rival, he had only to go back again to the hotel and push the gun down into the garbage can to make sure that somebody else would pay the penalty for his crime.”

“Any proof of that wild theory?” Gulling asked.

“Fingerprints on the under side of the garbage-can cover,” Mason said curtly. “You had your expert develop those prints, but your reasoning was so sloppy that you failed to check them with the witnesses’ prints. You have your fingerprint expert here, and Orville Reedley is outside. I suggest that in just about five minutes you can determine whether you’ve got proof or not.”

And, moving with calm assurance, Mason walked toward the door. Bowing to the foreman of the Grand Jury, he said, “I guess you gentlemen don’t need me any more.”

The foreman smiled. “Better wait until we get those fingerprints,” he said.

Paul Drake and Della Street were sitting in Mason’s private office when the lawyer unlocked the door and entered.

“Gosh, Perry,” Paul Drake said, “it’s ten o’clock. Did they give you a good sweating?”

Mason grinned. “They sweated the truth out of me.”

“What do you mean?”

Mason said, “I was darn near asleep at the switch, Paul. It took the jolt of your message about that key to jar me into realizing the truth.”

“Go on. Shoot.”

“We were all hypnotized because we had been given an erroneous time factor. Because the murder was committed in the apartment house with a weapon that left that building at eleven minutes past two, we naturally assumed that the murder had been committed before that. And Adelle Winters didn’t help any. She’s a most terrible liar. Whenever the going gets rough she hides from the facts. Because she felt certain the murder had been committed while she was down in the lobby at the apartment house, she told about seeing an empty shell in the gun and smelling powder. Actually, she did no such thing, but she wanted to have some good reason which would explain why she ditched the gun and, of course, she felt certain the gun had been fired at that time.”

“Hadn’t it?”

“Gosh, no!”

“It was in the garbage pail after that.”

“Actually, the revolver made another trip back to the apartment house and then back to the garbage pail.”

“Who did it?”

“Orville Reedley. He went to the hotel to see what Adelle Winters had been looking for in the garbage pail. Actually, he assumed she might have dropped something in and wanted to see what it was. He found a gun lying on top of the garbage. He was the only one who knew that the revolver was in the garbage pail. And as it happened, he was smart enough to realize that he could take that gun, go kill the man he wanted out of the way, and have a perfect setup to blame the crime on someone else. Where he slipped up was in leaving the print of his right index finger and his ring finger on the inside of the metal handle on the garbage pail. Once they took his fingerprints and compared them with the developed latents on the garbage pail, there was nothing to it.”

“How about the wallet that Adelle Winters took — if she did take it?” Della Street asked. “That’s what’s bothering me.”

“It bothered me too,” Mason admitted, “and it bothered Gulling. The story about that wallet is really good.”

“What is it?”

“After Orville Reedley had pulled the trigger, he realized that he might plant a little additional evidence if he could make it appear that the body had been frisked. He knew that someone was going to discover the body; he thought it would be Adelle Winters. When he took the wallet from Hines’s pocket there was only four hundred and fifty dollars in it, and he wasn’t sure that would be considered enough to have tempted somebody to steal the wallet. The person he was laying for all along, of course, was Adelle Winters. He felt certain she’d be back. Understand, he didn’t know why the two women had left the apartment. It was his idea — as you know — that the woman who was occupying the place — the woman whose chaperone Adelle Winters was — was his wife. And it was Adelle Winters that he wanted to involve. So he cast some bread on the waters. He opened his own wallet, extracted thirty-one hundred dollars, pushed the bills into the wallet, then tossed the wallet into the bedroom and closed the door. And Adelle Winters did exactly what he hoped she’d do.”

“Then Reedley must have confessed,” Drake said.

“That’s right,” Mason told him. “When he was confronted with the fingerprint evidence, and as soon as it became evident that they really had a perfect case against him, he switched completely around with that emotional instability of his and told the whole story. The interesting part of it was that Gulling had another trump up his sleeve for me, just as I was afraid he might have. He tried to show that, because Adelle Winters was my client and because she had taken the wallet, under the law in regard to lost property that has been found, she was guilty of larceny. And that gave me a chance to play my trump card!”