Erle Gardner - The Case of the Empty Tin

Then from the dark bowels of the house there came another sound, a dull, muffled, thudding noise as though someone had struck against something in the dark, or knocked something down. This noise came very definitely from the lower floor. That called for activity on the part of her husband.

Mrs. Gentrie hurried back to the bedroom. She was shivering now, and abruptly conscious of the fact that a night wind was blowing the lace curtains, billowing them into miniature balloons that remained distended for a while, then collapsed, letting the curtains fall against the screen with an audible slapping noise.

Mrs. Gentrie had been the first to bed. Her husband had been puttering around with painting in the cellar. That was what came of trusting Arthur to open the windows. He’d neglected to pull back the curtains. There might be an intruder on the lower floor, but Mrs. Gentrie considered the curtains to be the matter of paramount importance just then. Slapping against that dusty screen, they’d get themselves filled with dirt... “Arthur,” she called as she crossed the room and looped back the curtains.

Her husband failed to respond. She had to shake him awake, impressing upon him the fact that there’d been a series of noises.

“Junior coming in,” he said.

Mrs. Gentrie looked at the clock. It was thirty-five minutes past midnight. “He’ll have been in long before this,” she said.

“Look in his room?”

“No. I tell you it was someone running, stumbling over something.”

“It was Junior coming in and the wind blowing a door shut.”

“But I heard some other noises from down on the lower floor.”

“Wind,” he said, then as her very silence became sufficiently pronounced to constitute a contradiction, “Well, I’ll go take a look.”

She knew that Arthur’s look would be perfunctory. She could hear him moving around on the lower floor, switching on lights. She wondered about Junior. Once more she walked down the corridor toward the head of the stairs. Junior’s room was the first on the right as you came up the stairs. His door was closed. She opened it gently, looked inside.

“Junior.”

There was no answer.

Somehow, the dark interior of the room indicated that it was empty. She clicked on a light switch. Junior wasn’t in his room. The unwrinkled, smooth, white counterpane seemed to Mrs. Gentrie a fresh cause for alarm. But the plodding steps of her husband, climbing wearily back up the staircase, seemed, somehow, reassuring in a matter-of-fact sort of way. And suddenly, she wanted to shield Junior — didn’t want her husband to know he wasn’t in.

“Was anyone down there?” she asked, moving away from the door of Junior’s room.

“Of course not,” he said. “You heard the cellar door bang shut. The wind blew it shut, and Mephisto jumped...”

“The cellar door!”

“Yes, going down from the kitchen.”

“Why, it’s always kept closed. It...”

“No. I left it open tonight. I did some painting down there, and wanted to let the air circulate. The wind blew it shut, that’s all.”

Mrs. Gentrie felt sheepish. The very weariness in her husband’s voice, the dejected slump of his shoulders as he walked down the corridor, carried conviction to her mind. She had become nervous, permitted herself to magnify and distort noises of the night. Arthur, plodding down the corridor, had the attitude of a man who has learned from twenty-one years of married life that women will get those ideas and send men prowling around on nocturnal investigations. Nothing can be done about it, so there’s no need to remonstrate after it’s all over; just get back into bed, try to get warm again, and back to sleep.

Mrs. Gentrie, feeling apologetic, followed her husband to bed. She snuggled close to him, heard once more the gentle rhythm of his breathing, felt the delicious warmth of drowsiness stealing over her like some powerful drug dragging her into the welcome oblivion of sleep.

The alarm wakened her in the morning. She shut it off and pulled down the window. Putting on her robe, she moved around the upper floor, pressing the controls which turned on the gas furnace in the cellar. In the dim light of early morning, her fears of the night before seemed rather ludicrous. But she couldn’t resist looking into Junior’s room.

His clothes were piled in a careless heap on a chair by the window. He lay wrapped in the blankets, deep in slumber.

It was only after she had seen him that Mrs. Gentrie realized how much she had feared that when she opened the door the unwrinkled counterpane and smooth white of the pillowcases would greet her once more, just as they had done at thirty-five minutes past midnight.

Mrs. Gentrie closed the door quietly. Junior didn’t need to get up for an hour yet.

So the big house took up once more the burden of its daily routine — a routine which differed no whit from that of any other day until the sound of screaming sirens tore the silence of the neighborhood into shreds, and completely disrupted the smooth functioning of Mrs. Gentrie’s domestic machinery.

Perry Mason was standing at the cigar counter buying a package of cigarettes when Della Street came through the doorway, carried along by the stream of people pouring in from the street. Several masculine eyes looked at her with approval as she swung to the outer edge of the file of in-pouring office workers. From the straight seams of her stockings to the tilt of her chin, she represented a feminine bundle of neat efficiency which was remarkably easy on the eyes.

Perry Mason, tossing a quarter on the glass counter and turning back toward the elevators, encountered Della Street’s smiling eyes looking up at him. “What is the rush?” she asked.

Mason gripped her elbows with his hand. “Surprise!” he said.

“I’ll say it’s a surprise. What’s bringing you down this early? Is there a murder in the air that I haven’t sniffed? I didn’t expect to see you before eleven, not after the way you were working last night when I went home. I suppose the office is a litter.”

“Your supposition is entirely correct,” he said, “and don’t try putting away the books in the law library. I’ve worked out a new theory in that Consolidated case. The books are all lying face open, piled one on top of the other in the exact order that I want to follow in dictating an office brief.”

They walked together into one of the crowded elevators, stood back from the door, being pushed into the intimacy of a close proximity by the packed humanity. Mason’s hand, still on Della Street’s arm, tightened into that little gesture of friendship and understanding which was the keynote of their relationship.

“Going to win that case?” she asked.

He nodded, smiled at her, but said nothing until the elevator stopped to let them out, then as they walked down the long corridor, he said, “It’s a cinch now. I always thought it should have been presented on the doctrine of ‘last clear chance,’ but I couldn’t find the authorities to support that contention. Last night about eleven o’clock I uncovered just the line of decisions I wanted.”

“Nice going,” she said.

Della Street unlocked the door of Mason’s private office, said, “I’ll take a peek at the outer office and see what’s doing. I suppose you’ll want the mail?”

Mason grinned. “Not all the mail. High-grade it for checks. Throw the bills away, and put the other correspondence in the deferred file.”

“Where it will duly repose for a week or two, and then get transferred to the dead file,” she said.

“Oh, well, if there’s anything important, you’ll know what to do about it.”

Mason, who hated all letters with the aversion a man of action feels for routine work, hung up his hat in the cloak closet, walked over to the window, looked down for a moment at the confusion of tangled traffic, then turned back to his desk. Picking up a law book which lay open on his blotter, he started studying the decision. As he followed an obscure legal principle through an intricate maze of legal reasoning, the corners of his eyes puckered with the enjoyment of concentration. Slowly, as though hardly aware of what he was doing, he pulled out the swivel chair and settled down at his desk without interrupting his reading.