Эрл Гарднер - The Case of the Shapely Shadow

“On Tuesday, the third.”

“At what time?”

“At approximately eight-forty-five.”

“Did you have any business transactions with her?”

“Yes.”

“What were they?”

“I sold her a pair of scissors.”

“Was there any conversation?”

“Yes, she said she wanted a pair of small scissors that would cut pieces out of a newspaper.”

“Did you observe anything under her arm at the time she made this statement?”

“Yes. She had two newspapers folded under her left arm.”

“Cross-examine,” Hamilton Burger said.

“No questions,” Mason observed affably.

Hamilton Burger said triumphantly, “That concludes the prosecution’s case.”

Mason arose, looked at the clock. “If the Court please, it is rather unusual for a murder case to be handled in such an expeditious manner. The defense is taken somewhat by surprise. I would like to ask for an adjournment until two o’clock this afternoon so that I may confer with my client.”

Judge Seymour shook his head. “We’re trying to get the calendar caught up, Mr. Mason. I admit that it’s unusual for a case of this magnitude to be handled in this expeditious manner, but we still have a good hour. I will state, however, that it is time for us to take our usual morning recess and in place of the usual ten-minute recess I will make it a twenty-minute recess, and that will give you time to confer with your client.”

Judge Seymour turned to the jury. “The Court will take a recess for twenty minutes during which time you will again remember the admonition of the Court not to discuss the case, or permit it to be discussed in your presence, or to form or express any opinion.”

Judge Seymour arose and left the bench.

As the courtroom cleared of spectators, Mason turned to Janice Wainwright. “Well, Janice?” he asked in a whisper.

“Mr. Mason,” she said, “they’re making that look something terrible, but actually it was just an innocent errand that I ran for Mr. Theilman.”

“Go on,” Mason said, “keep talking.”

“Mr. Theilman asked me to run down and get him the morning papers, both of them, and said there was some stuff he wanted to cut out about a real estate development and asked me to get him some scissors. I had to go out and buy some because I’d broken the office pair a few days before.”

“Then what?” Mason asked.

“After I returned to the office, he asked me to go down and get two more papers.”

“What became of those papers?” Mason asked.

“I don’t know. He never put them in the wastebasket, I’m certain of that. But usually he didn’t throw papers in the wastebasket. He would keep old newspapers in the closet. He had a pile of them, and then the janitor would remove them after the pile got so big. We’d save them for wrapping and things of that sort, and sometimes Mr. Theilman would want to refer to a back issue of the paper in order to check some of the real estate ads. But after he’d cut things out of papers usually he put those papers in the wastebasket, only this time he didn’t.”

Mason said, “Janice, I’m going to have to put you on the stand. You must realize that the circumstantial evidence is very black against you. Now, you have an explanation of sorts for everything — ‘Theilman said this, Theilman told me to do that, Theilman told me to do the other, I was following Mr. Theilman’s instructions.’

“Now Mr. Theilman is dead. You can understand what the prosecution is going to do to you once you get on the witness stand. They’re going to insist that you have fabricated a story in which you have deliberately made all the explanations dependent upon what Theilman told you, and that the reason you have done that is because Theilman is dead and can’t contradict you.

“Under those circumstances everything depends on the impression you make on the jurors. You can’t afford to lose your temper, you can’t afford to get hysterical, you can’t afford to start crying. You’ve got to stand up there and take it on the chin.

“You understand that?”

“Yes.”

“Can you do it?”

“Mr. Mason, I... I’m afraid I can’t.”

“I’m afraid you can’t, either,” Mason said grimly. “All right, Janice. You have about fifteen minutes left to start thinking things over. Become composed. Get your story together. I’ve carried the ball up to this point. After court reconvenes you’ll have to carry the ball. Now you sit there and think things over.”

Mason walked away from her and over to where Paul Drake and Della Street were standing.

“Not so good, Perry,” Paul Drake said. “That last was a real bombshell.”

Mason said, “She says she was getting the papers for Mr. Theilman.”

“And very conveniently Mr. Theilman isn’t in a position to contradict her,” Paul Drake said dryly. “I think your client is a liar.”

Mason said, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from practicing law, Paul, it’s that an attorney must be reasonably skeptical of the things his client tells him until he gets into court, and then he must accept every word his client says at face value. He must stand up in front of the jury and show that he believes what his client is saying.”

“I know,” Drake said sympathetically, “but that was quite a bombshell, Perry. That—”

“Well, let’s analyze it,” Perry said. “What does it mean?”

“It means,” Drake said, “that your client went downstairs, got some newspapers, came back and pasted a blackmail message on a sheet of paper. Then she decided she’d make a good job of it so she went down and got another set of newspapers and pasted a blackmail message which was sent to Theilman at his residence.”

“All right, why would she do that?” Mason asked.

“She wanted to be sure he got it.”

“Theilman was in his office. All she had to do was to put that message in with the mail and he was sure to get it, and what’s more she’d know that he had it.”

“Well, perhaps she wanted his wife to know about it,” Drake said.

“On the other hand,” Mason said, “suppose Theilman planned on disappearing and wanted to get as much ready cash as he could. He wanted to leave a blackmail message behind and wanted to be sure that people knew about it. He hoped that Janice Wainwright would look in the wastebasket and find the message there but he didn’t know whether she would be too ethical to dig out the pieces and read it, so he put another message in the inside pocket of his suit and then went home and changed his suit, knowing his wife’s habit of looking through the pockets.”

Drake said, “You’re client is a pretty good-looking babe, Perry. If she backs up that story with enough nylon, and you can make it sound convincing to the jury, you may get a hung jury out of it.”

Mason suddenly stiffened to attention.

Della Street, knowing his every mood, watching him, said, “What is it, Perry?”

Perry snapped his fingers. “Simple,” he said, “and I almost overlooked it.”

“What?”

“If the message was cut from those papers,” Mason said, “then it was either prepared by Theilman or by Janice Wainwright. In either event the message couldn’t have come through the mail, and if that is the case the letter from A. B. Vidal — that is, the addressed envelope — has to be a dummy.”

“But,” Della Street said, “Janice said that that envelope was in the mail... It had to be in that envelope.”

“But it couldn’t have been,” Mason said.

“I’m afraid,” Drake told him, “that that’s one of the things the prosecution is going to pick on. You can see what they’re doing, Perry. Hamilton Burger is here to have the honor of cross-examining your client, of ripping her story to pieces. Once she gets on that witness stand, Hamilton Burger is going to be the hero of the piece and he wouldn’t be in here in that capacity unless he had some card up his sleeve.”