Erle Gardner - The Case of the Empty Tin

Following instructions to the letter, he left his car in the five-hundred block on Hillgrade Avenue and walked up the steep incline toward the intersection.

Six hundred and four was the first house on the right, after he had passed the intersection. It was a typical Southern California bungalow, neat, cool, efficiently arranged, and without anything to differentiate it from thousands of other bungalows. The house seemed dark and deserted. Mason, however, had expected this. If Mrs. Perlin had decided to follow him, to make certain he wasn’t leading police to the place, it would normally take her some little time, after she had satisfied herself, to enter the house and turn on the lights. It was quite possible she’d deliberately keep him waiting. The fact that she had instructed him to wait until he saw the light and then go in through the back door convinced him that the woman herself would slip in through the front door, divest herself of hat and coat, and subsequently claim she had been in the house all the time.

Mason, keeping to the shadows, moved around toward the garage at the back of the house. A moon in the last quarter furnished a faint yellowish light which enabled him to find his way down the side street and into the driveway which led to the garage. Beneath the deep shadows of a spreading pepper tree, the lawyer found an empty box which he improvised as a chair, and waited.

He watched for a light to come on in the house. The luminous hands of Mason’s watch ticked through an interval of minutes without anything happening — fifteen minutes — twenty minutes.

Mason moved restlessly. He’d have to reach Paul Drake soon or there would be complications.

Mason eased himself off the box, tiptoed toward the house. A vague, disquieting thought intruded itself upon his mind. If this should be some elaborate hoax, some runaround by which Mason was to be placed on a spot, what could put him in a more embarrassing position than to be caught prowling around the back yard of a house at nearly two o’clock in the morning. After all, he’d been unusually credulous, too credulous in fact. It had been because of some quality in that voice, as well as because he’d been aroused out of sound slumber. Her voice had held a note of well-modulated poise which had, somehow, impressed Mason with its sincerity.

He looked at his watch again and reluctantly determined he’d have to go telephone Paul Drake, and call off his vigil. Quite evidently, she had anticipated he might do something like that, and had determined to keep him waiting until...

A light was switched on in the house.

Mason could see the beam pouring through an unshaded window. It splashed across a strip of lawn, and against an ornamental hedge. At the same time, Mason became acutely conscious that this all might be some clever trap. A voice on the telephone — Mason sent to the back yard of a strange house. Then they had only to put through a telephone call to the occupant of that house. When he switched on the light to answer the phone, Mason would come up to try the back door. Anyone would be legally justified in shooting him as a burglar.

There was a vast difference between making a rendezvous over the phone with a reassuringly calm voice and actually waiting in the midnight chill of a strange back yard.

Mason decided to let the back door determine the issue. If it turned out to be unlocked, he would go in, come what may. Otherwise, he’d return home and say nothing.

He tiptoed up the walk, paused for a moment as he encountered the back steps, then felt his way up, opened a screen door, winced inwardly at the creak of a rusty spring, stepped across a linoleum-covered surface, and tentatively tried the knob of the back door.

It opened readily enough.

Mason gently pushed the door. He could see the faint gleam of a reflected light trickling through from some room down a corridor. He took a cautious step forward — and the light was suddenly switched off, leaving the entire interior of the house in darkness. His eyes accustomed by now to this darkness, Mason could find no clue to indicate in which room the light had been turned on and then off again.

Standing in the midst of a darkness which had suddenly become a baffling barrier to further progress, smelling those peculiar homey smells which invariably attach themselves to a kitchen, Mason waited for some development that would give him a cue on which to proceed.

Abruptly the break he had been waiting for came. He heard the gasping intake of a sobbing breath, then the sound of light feet coming groping down a corridor. The steps were coming toward him. From the kitchen there might be a swinging door...

He heard hinges creak cautiously. A door was pushed back. For a fleeting instant, he had the feeling that someone was standing on the threshold of a swinging door, listening. Then the door swung back, and Mason realized someone was groping toward him, looking either for him or for the back door.

Mason moved back a cautious step, his left hand groping for the light switch which he realized must be on the wall in the vicinity of the back door. The person in the room was groping blindly. Mason heard this person stumble against a table, and took advantage of the noise to turn toward the back door so he could see more clearly the location of his objective. His foot kicked a chair. He heard a quick startled intake of breath, then a woman’s voice saying quickly, “Who’s there? Who is it? Speak up or I’ll shoot.”

Mason said, “I’ve come to keep my appointment.”

He realized then that she was no longer coming toward him, but was backing away under cover of the darkness, moving quickly, trying not to make any noise, yet he could distinctly hear the sound of groping motion. His fingers, sliding along the wall, found the button of the light switch. He pushed it.

It was a light on the screened porch, but the illumination from it, seeping through the open door and into the kitchen, gave sufficient light so that they could see each other.

She was evidently young. Her body held the lithe lines of resilient youth. It was impossible to see the expression on her face, but he could see the arm which was stretched out in front, and the ominous glint of metal in the hand, which was extended toward him.

Mason said, “Don’t be foolish. Put down the gun.”

The hand didn’t so much as waver. “Who are you, and what do you want?”

“I’m here to keep an appointment.”

“With whom?”

“With the woman who made it. Are you she?”

“I most certainly am not. Stand to one side and let me out.”

“You don’t live here?”

She hesitated a moment, then said, “No.”

Mason stood to one side. “Go ahead,” he said.

She came toward him cautiously. Light coming through the doorway struck her face. He could see deep brown eyes, a rather short, pert nose, light golden hair which fluffed out from under the rolled-up brim of a small hat perched jauntily on one side of her head. She was rather tall, and her short skirt disclosed legs which had a long graceful sweep from knee to ankle.

“Just keep back out of the way,” she warned, holding the gun on him as she came forward.

“Why the artillery?” Mason asked, trying to trap her into conversation.

She did not deign to answer his question, simply kept moving forward with that slow, wary approach as though she were stalking him.

“Don’t get nervous and pull the trigger on that gun,” Mason said apprehensively.

“I know what I’m doing.”

“Then look out for that chair in front of you,” he warned. “You’ll hit that, the gun will go off, and...”

She turned her head slightly in the direction indicated, and Mason’s long arms shot out. His left hand clamped down over her right wrist. He felt her muscles bunch into tension. His fingers squeezed the strength out of her wrist. When he felt her fingers grow limp, he took the revolver from her hand, and slipped it into the side pocket of his coat.