Эрл Гарднер - The Case of the Backward Mule

Clane said, “I located him the same way you did.”

“And how did we locate him?”

“I suppose by using your head.”

“Well, now, isn’t that interesting? Do you mean a man could just sit down and think and find out what particular auto court this man happened to be hidden in?”

“Don’t be foolish,” Clane said wearily. “I decided an auto court was the only place for him to go, an auto court that was pretty well outside of the city. If you’ll check back you’ll find that I’ve been stopping all the way between San Jose and here asking at every one of the less pretentious auto courts.”

“Well now, if you have,” Malloy said, “that might be... No. I guess it wouldn’t either. The D.A. would laugh at me. He’d say, ‘Don’t be silly, Jim, that’s an easy way to make an alibi. It’s something the guy did himself and it didn’t take him over half an hour or an hour at the outside to do. If word got around that we were pushovers for stuff like that, why everybody would be doing it’.”

“Have it your own way,” Clane said.

“You’re something of a mystery to me,” Malloy went on. “I mean you really are, Clane. I just can’t figure it out. Now here you are, back from China, sitting on top of the world, and you start right in mixing in with this thing, which is after all really none of your business. Now take that Chinese scrub woman you have, for instance. You know, you almost had me fooled there. I thought I’d better give her a lift down to Chinatown and talk to her a little bit, and then she fooled me. I was all ready to let her go, but I thought I’d better take a look in that laundry package. And what do you think I found in there?”

Clane said nothing.

“A woman’s plaid coat and a hat, an expensive pair of shoes that fit the Chinese girl’s feet like a glove, a pair of real genuine nylon stockings and an expensive silk blouse. Now I leave it to you, Clane, if that ain’t a mighty funny package of laundry for a woman to be taking away from a man’s apartment. Now, the funny thing about that coat is that it seems to be Cynthia Renton’s coat. There’s a tailor’s label on the inside and the tailor says it’s a coat he made for Cynthia Renton.”

“And what does the Chinese girl say?”

“Well, the Chinese girl doesn’t say anything much. She sort of intimates that the clothes are cast-off things that had been given to her by some Chinese charitable outfit, but she was carrying a purse with over five hundred dollars in it and a driving license in the name of Sou Ha, and she can’t tell us the name of the charitable agency that gave her the clothes. And then I got to thinking around about that case we had years ago and darned if there wasn’t a Chinese girl mixed up in that case. I think her name was Sou Ha. You know how it is with these Chinese, Mr. Clane, it’s hard to remember their faces, particularly the women. One looks exactly like another.”

“And so you arrested her?” Clane asked.

“Well, we didn’t exactly arrest her. We’re holding her for questioning. She’s what you might call the guest of the city, if you know what I mean.”

“I guess I know what you mean.”

“Perhaps you can explain how it happens that she had Cynthia Renton’s coat?”

“I don’t feel much like making explanations right now.”

“Well, now, that’s too bad. And you were the one who could concentrate so readily, too. You could concentrate regardless of distractions and all that stuff.”

Clane said nothing.

“I was hoping perhaps you could concentrate on some of this stuff. After all, Clane, I hate to take you along and charge you with being an accessory after the fact. Now suppose you tell us just how you knew Harold was at this place.”

“If you’ve been sleuthing around, locating him here, you certainly must have crossed my back trail.”

There was a moment’s silence and Clane would have given much if he could have seen the expression on Malloy’s face. But after a moment Malloy said, almost too casually, “Suppose you tell us just how you went about it, Clane.”

Clane told him of the survey of the places from which Harold could have placed a call, the trail he had uncovered, his patient work in running it down.

Malloy listened without interruption. How much of it was news to him, Clane had no means of knowing.

When Clane had finished, Malloy said, “I’ve been looking into the whereabouts of the two Taonons. Around eight-thirty this morning Mrs. Taonon rang up police headquarters to see if there had been any news of her husband — said he hadn’t been home all night, and she was afraid there might have been a traffic accident or something. She said he got a phone call around ten o’clock and rushed out as though he was in quite a hurry. He told her he’d be back in thirty minutes — but he never came back. And now it seems that she’s disappeared, too. The man that went to their apartment reports that she isn’t there.”

“Now then,” Malloy went on, “I saw you in that grocery store up near Hendrum’s place. I suppose you were making inquiries trying to find out where those groceries came from. Now that’s police routine. An amateur just can’t do that sort of stuff. In the first place, you don’t have any standing. You make the grocers suspicious and you’re talking about a good customer of theirs.”

“You can see what’s bound to happen. You go into a store and start asking questions about whether Bill Hendrum, let us say, bought an order of groceries in the last few days consisting of about forty or fifty dollars’ worth of canned goods and stuff. The manager of the store won’t tell you whether he did or didn’t. Then, before you’re out of the store good, the proprietor rings up Bill Hendrum in case Hendrum happens to be a customer of his and tells him all about the conversation.”

Clane looked properly contrite.

“So you see,” Malloy went on, “that’s where you amateurs mess things up. Now the police move in, take over the inquiry and have some official status. They can warn the grocer not to say anything and then start questioning him. In that way, they don’t alarm the suspect.”

“Yes, I see your point, now that you make it,” Clane said apologetically.

“So, you see,” Malloy went on, “by ten o’clock this morning, we knew where those groceries came from — something you wouldn’t have been able to find out in a week, even if you’d done nothing but leg work.”

“Where did they come from?” Clane asked.

“Well, now,” Malloy said, “I don’t know as there’s any harm in telling you, the way things are right now. They were purchased by Mrs. Ricardo Taonon.”

Clane was silent, thinking that over.

“And,” Inspector Malloy went on musingly, “Taonon was a pretty good husband in some ways.”

“You say ‘ was ’,” Clane observed.

“Well, now, I did, didn’t I?” Malloy said. “That’s funny — just some sort of a subconscious trick, I guess.”

“You mean he’s dead?”

“He’s disappeared, was the way I expressed it.”

“That was the way you expressed it, and then you started referring to him in the past tense.”

“Well, I don’t know why I did that,” Malloy said. “What I started out to say was that he was a good husband. He has a lot of businesses that are more or less tangled up, but I understand he’s fixed things so that in case anything happens to him his wife won’t have any trouble raising money to meet taxes and all that stuff. He carries quite a slug of insurance.”

“And you think something’s happened to him?”

“Well, now, I wouldn’t want you to quote me as saying he’d been killed.”

“But you think he has?”