Эрл Гарднер - The Case of the Spurious Spinster

“Oh, yes, I’m quite sure. She has certain little mannerisms of speaking and I have a good ear for voices on the telephone. I’m quite certain it was she.”

“You turned the car in and walked here from the car-rental agency?”

She hesitated.

“Did you?”

“No. Mr. Mason, I know I shouldn’t have, but I was so upset... I stopped at the cocktail lounge and had a drink. I needed it.”

“They know you there?”

“Yes. The bartender is very nice. I stop in there once in a while.”

“How long were you there?”

“Not long — ten or fifteen minutes.”

“Then you came here?”

“Yes.”

Mason frowned. “The thing simply doesn’t make sense,” he said. “You can’t fit it together any way so it does make sense... did Miss Corning tell you anything about her sister or her business manager from South America?”

“Not a thing,” Susan said.

“Look here, Susan,” Mason said. “This woman is from South America. She hasn’t been here for years. She couldn’t have given you all that detailed information. She couldn’t have known about the distances, whether or not the attendant at the service station was alone, or—”

“Oh, but she could,” Susan interrupted. “She said she’d engaged a detective agency and that all of these things were bits of a puzzle that would all fit together. She said the persons who had been planning to loot the company were planning a meeting that we were going to walk in on. She said that by the time you returned to town we’d have all the evidence you needed... and it was Miss Corning, all right. I knew her voice. There couldn’t be any mistake.”

Mason said, “I’m afraid you’ve either been a credulous little fool, or that Miss Corning has exposed herself to danger and may have been injured — and in that event you’re really in trouble.”

“But, Mr. Mason, what could I do? Absolutely everything depends on having the confidence and the backing of Miss Corning. I couldn’t do anything except what I did... She said her detectives had just reported and that there was no time to spare. She said she’d have given ten thousand dollars if they’d reported a little earlier and before you had phoned her. She said she thought you were in Mojave.”

Abruptly Mason started pacing the floor, his eyes level-lidded with concentration.

“What’s the matter?” Susan Fisher asked. “Do you suppose...?”

Della Street, knowing the lawyer’s habits of thought, motioned Sue to silence with a finger on her lips.

Mason paced back and forth for nearly two minutes. Suddenly he whirled. “All right, Sue, can you draw me an accurate diagram of the place where you parked the car?”

“Of course. She gave me a description of mileage and I took it down in shorthand and—”

“Where’s the shorthand?”

“Right here.”

“Have you transcribed it?”

“No.”

“Do you have a typewriter here?”

“Yes.”

“Write out the description,” Mason said, “just as fast as you can. Then sit right here in this apartment. Don’t leave until I tell you to, no matter what happens.”

Spurred by the urgency of his manner, Sue Fisher uncovered a typewriter, ratcheted in paper and typed out the driving directions.

Mason studied the paper for a moment, folded it, shoved it in his pocket, said to Della Street, “Come on, Della.”

“I’m to wait here?” Sue Fisher asked.

“Right here,” Mason instructed, “and if Miss Corning phones find out where she is, then call Paul Drake and tell him. In the meantime, I’m going to phone Paul Drake to put a bodyguard on duty here.”

“Suppose she phones and tells me to go out to join her and—”

“Find out where she is, phone Drake’s agency, and then do exactly as she says. If you notice a man following you, don’t be afraid. That will be Drake’s man.”

Mason hurried Della Street to the elevator, paused to phone instructions to Paul Drake from the booth in the lobby, then hurried to his car.

“We’re going out there?” Della Street asked.

Mason nodded.

“Why? What do you expect to find?”

Mason said, “We may be in time to prevent a murder.”

“Chief, you think... you mean...?”

“Exactly,” Mason said.

Ordinarily an exponent of careful, safe driving, Mason on this occasion crowded his car into speed.

“You’ll be picked up,” Della Street warned as Mason shot through a changing traffic signal.

“So much the better,” Mason told her. “We’ll impress an officer into service and take him along.”

But there were no officers. The lawyer drove up on Mulholland Drive and started checking distances.

“This is the service station,” Della Street said.

Mason, tight-lipped, nodded grimly, slowed his speed and moved cautiously down the road.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Della Street said. “That’s the place right there, where she had the car parked, Chief.”

“I know it,” Mason said. “I don’t want to leave our car parked there.”

He drove on another hundred yards before he found a place where he could park the car. He took a flashlight from the glove compartment. “Come on, Della,” he said.

The lawyer’s long legs set a pace which forced Della Street to keep at a half-trot in order to keep up with him. They came back to the cleared place in the road where there were marks of tires in the soft soil.

The questing beam of Mason’s flashlight moved around through the brush.

“Precisely what are you looking for?” Della Street asked.

Abruptly the beam of the flashlight answered her question as it came to rest on a red one-gallon can which had been thrown over into the brush.

“The gasoline can,” Della Street said. “It must be empty!”

Mason nodded.

“Do we pick it up and...?”

“We touch nothing,” Mason said. “This way, Della.”

Automobiles which had been driven through the low brush out towards the steep slope had made a roadway which consisted of but little more than two parallel lines of broken low brush.

Mason led the way to a point where there was a cleared space right at the edge of the steep slope. Petting parties had parked here, then turned their cars and gone back to the highway so that there had been left a circular space virtually devoid of vegetation.

Mason switched out the flashlight and listened.

From Mulholland Drive there was the occasional whine of a car. Far, far below, the noises of the city, muted by distance, furnished a rumbling undertone. A sea of twinkling lights stretched as far as the eye could see until a dark segment marked the location of the ocean. Overhead, stars blazed in tranquil steadiness.

“What a beautiful, beautiful spot,” Della Street said. “Wouldn’t this make an ideal—” She broke off abruptly with a half-scream.

Mason’s flashlight, which had been switched on once more and was exploring the edges of the clearing, came to rest on a sprawled shape lying on its back in the unmistakably grotesque posture of death.

Mason moved closer.

The odor of raw gasoline permeated the atmosphere.

The lawyer’s flashlight came to rest on the features.

“Chief,” Della Street said, half-hysterically, “it’s Lowry — Ken Lowry, the manager of the mine.”

Mason nodded. The beam of the flashlight continued to move.

“And here are account books,” Della Street said, “all soaked in gasoline.”

Mason nodded, approached the body of Ken Lowry. The lawyer bent over him and felt for a pulse.

“All right, Della,” he said, “let’s go.”

“Chief, what happened? What...?”

“We were too late to prevent a murder,” Mason said. “We may have been early enough to have prevented the destruction of evidence.”