Эрл Гарднер - The Case of the Lonely Heiress

Marilyn Marlow, white and shaken with the shock of what she had found, was waiting in the reception hallway.

“All right,” Mason said, “let’s have it fast. What happened?”

“I... I came to see Rose Keeling. She’s... she’s in there on the floor by the bathroom.”

Mason said to Della Street, “You’d better stay there, Della.”

He walked rapidly down the corridor, looked in at the open door of the bedroom and looked briefly at the sprawled white body lying motionless against a sinister red background.

For a brief moment the lawyer surveyed the ingredients of the tragedy, the packed suitcases, the nude body, the clothes on the bed, the open bathroom door. Then he turned back down the corridor toward the living room.

“Where’s the phone?” he asked.

Marilyn Marlow indicated the telephone.

“You picked up the receiver and dialed my number. Did you call anyone else?”

“No.”

Mason said, “That telephone call puts us in a spot.”

“What do you mean?”

Mason said, “At twenty minutes to twelve I called this number. Someone was here. Someone evidently who didn’t want the phone to keep on ringing and ringing. The receiver was gently lifted off the cradle and...”

“Why, that’s right,” Marilyn Marlow interrupted. “When I came here, the receiver was lying beside the telephone. It had been left off the cradle. I had to put it back and then wait for a minute for the line to come back in service.”

Mason nodded, said, “The person who lifted the receiver was probably the murderer. We caught him in the middle of what he was doing, and the continued ringing of the telephone either made him nervous or else he was afraid it would attract attention, so he took the receiver off the hook. His fingerprints will be on the receiver. The hell of it is, yours will be on there too.”

“Well, what’s wrong with that? I’ll tell the police exactly what happened and...”

“That’s what we’re coming to,” Mason said. “We may not want to tell the police exactly what happened.”

“Why not?”

Mason said, “You probably have never stopped to figure it out, but it was considerably to your advantage to have Rose Keeling out of the way.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Mason said, “Rose Keeling was a subscribing witness to that will. She was threatening to change her testimony. As long as she was alive, she could do it. Now that she is dead, she can’t do it. You can use the testimony that was given by her at the time she went on the stand when the will was being admitted to probate. Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“How long have you understood it?”

“Well — Mr. Caddo was the first one to point it out to me clearly.”

“Do you mean he suggested that it might be to your advantage to have Rose Keeling put out of the way?”

“Heavens, no! He only said that if Rose Keeling could be made to skip out, it would help.”

Mason’s eyes were boring steadily into those of Marilyn Marlow. “You knew that Rose Keeling was going to be really difficult to keep in line?”

“Yes, I knew it. I told you that.”

“And you also told Caddo?”

“Well, yes.”

“In other words, Caddo got under your skin pretty much. You talked quite a bit about your affairs.”

She started making nervous patterns on her dress with her left forefinger. “I guess I told Caddo too much.”

“How did you happen to spill everything to him?”

“I didn’t. He has that insinuating way with him. He had found out quite a lot, surmised a lot more, and he had that sort of — well, that sort of take-it-for-granted attitude that’s rather hard to deal with. He’d assume things and sometimes it was hard to differentiate between what I had told him and what he’d just taken for granted on his own.”

“You’d told him quite a bit, however?”

“Well, one way and another, he’d found out quite a bit about the situation.”

Mason said, “I telephoned you and told you Mrs. Caddo was on the warpath.”

She nodded.

“You were to warn Rose Keeling.”

“Yes.”

“And you did so?”

“Not right away.”

“Why not?”

“Something happened that — well, the situation became complicated.”

Mason said, “For the love of Mike, snap out of it! You’ve told a lot of this stuff to a perfect stranger who came along and handed you a good line, and now you’re trying to get reticent with your own lawyer. Get your cards on the table.”

She said, “The situation changed overnight.”

“What changed it?”

“A letter.”

“Who wrote it?”

“Rose.”

“Where is it?”

She opened her purse, took out an envelope and handed it to Mason.

Mason looked at the canceled stamp, at the pen-and-ink address, at the postmark which showed an imprint of 7:30 p.m. of the day before.

“When did you get this?”

“This morning. It was in the morning mail.”

Mason pulled note paper out of the envelope and read the pen-and-ink letter signed by Rose Keeling.

When he had finished reading it, he read it aloud for the benefit of Della Street:

“Dear Marilyn:

“I don’t like to write this letter. Your mother and I were close friends. I would do anything for her, but I can’t perjure myself. The plain truth of the matter is that my testimony when I got on the witness stand the first time was false. I tried to fix things so I could help your mother. Actually, I was out of the room at the time that the will was signed, if it ever was signed. I’ve tried to tell you about this in a nice way, so I could break it to you easy, but you thought I had my hand out and wanted some money or something. Nothing could have been farther from my thoughts. I was very friendly with your mother and I let that friendship distort my testimony when I was on the witness stand, and my conscience has been bothering me ever since. I have tried to break it to you easy, but I can’t; so now I’m breaking it to you the hard way. Sincerely yours,

“You got that letter this morning?” Mason asked Marilyn.

She nodded.

“You had it when I telephoned you?”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t tell me about it?”

“No.”

“Why?”

She said, “I felt certain it was — well, that Rose had made hints before and that I hadn’t done anything about it, and now she was trying to jar me into doing something. I knew that if I told you about it, you’d be very ethical and tell me I couldn’t pay her a cent.”

“But you intended to make some promise to pay her?”

“I didn’t know exactly what I did intend to do. You see, Mr. Mason, that letter is a lie. She was in the room when that will was signed. The testimony she gave when she was on the witness stand was the absolute truth. My mother told me so, and Ethel Furlong told me so. Ethel is a square-shooter. She has a good, clear memory, and she recalls everything that happened just as clearly as if it had been yesterday. Mr. Endicott was lying there on the bed and...”

“We’ll talk about that when we’ve got more time,” Mason interrupted. “What I want to do right now is reconstruct your time schedule for this morning.”

“Well, I got this letter and I didn’t know what to do about it. You see, the thing would have been different if I’d thought there was any possibility the letter told the truth, but I simply knew that it didn’t. Then you telephoned me about Mrs. Caddo and I was rather noncommittal. I felt for a minute it would be a mighty good thing if Dolores Caddo did go over to see Rose and make a scene. I thought something like that might give Rose Keeling something else to think about.”