Эрл Гарднер - The Case of the Shapely Shadow

“Troy almost got away with it. His mistake was that he was in such a hurry to get Janice’s car back that he didn’t have time to remove the hose but left it coiled and attached to the water outlet.”

“But how in the world did you happen to suspect Troy?” Drake asked.

“Because Theilman told Janice he couldn’t understand why his wife hadn’t been notified not to expect him for a few days. That means that after he called his wife at eight o’clock on the night of the third, something came up which caused him to change his mind about going home. So he instructed someone to so notify his wife.

“It was almost a certainty that that someone was Cole Troy. Troy knew Theilman had to be removed, so he didn’t put through the call.”

“And that shapely shadow Troy saw?” Drake asked.

“All a part of the scheme,” Mason said. “Troy spent the evening planning a campaign with Theilman. He lied when he said Theilman left for home, but by dressing up his lie with that story about the shapely shadow he was able to create a word picture of Theilman leaving his office and starting for home that fooled everyone.

“I began to suspect Troy when Janice told me Theilman was puzzled his wife hadn’t been notified of his change in plans. Troy had been instructed to phone her while Theilman was laying plans to go to Las Vegas to meet Carlotta.”

“Why didn’t Theilman phone his wife?” Drake asked.

It was Della Street who answered the question. “He didn’t want her to start questioning him about the nature of his business trip, silly. When you get married, Paul, you’ll learn these more elemental dodges of married men.”

Drake grinned. “How did you get all this knowledge?”

“Reading divorce complaints,” Della said.

Drake said, “All right. There’s one other thing I don’t understand. Where in the world did the taxi driver get that twenty-dollar bill?”

“He got it from Janice,” Mason said.

“What!” Janice Wainwright exclaimed.

“That’s right, he got it from you.”

“But he couldn’t have.”

“The thing was very simple,” Mason said, “and I admit that after I made an issue of it I was in a panic for fear the real solution would occur to Hamilton Burger. The only thing to do was to keep Burger so darn mad that the real solution never did occur to him.”

“Well, what was the solution?” Drake asked.

Mason grinned. “Janice, you got money out of the cash drawer in the safe. By that time Theilman had recovered the suitcase with the money in it. He had transferred some of the money to a brief case before locking the suitcase in the trunk of his car, and filled up the petty cash drawer in the safe so there would be plenty of money in case you had to take a trip for him in connection with the deal.

“Remember, we didn’t get the numbers of all the bills. Only some of them.”

“But I didn’t give any money to the cabdriver,” Janice said.

Mason said, “You went to the Double Take Casino. What did you do when you went in there?”

“I... I bought chips.”

“Exactly,” Mason said. “And you paid for them with what?”

“Why,” she said, “with twenty dollars out of my purse.”

“And,” Mason said, “Carlotta Theilman shortly afterwards hit a twenty-dollar jackpot. The cashier took the twenty-dollar bill which you had given him for chips and turned it over to Carlotta Theilman for the jackpot. It was one of those coincidences that happen in real life.

“In the Double Take they don’t give the actual coins when you hit a jackpot. A gold slug comes down and you exchange this slug with the cashier for the amount of the jackpot, whatever is listed on the outside of the machine.”

“Well, I’ll be darned!” Drake said. “And on the strength of that you got an acquittal.”

“I got an acquittal,” Mason said, “on the strength of my client’s innocence.”

“And what the newspaper characterizes as some of the fastest legal legerdemain that was ever pulled in a local courtroom,” Della Street said, proudly reading an excerpt from the newspaper account.