Erle Gardner - The Case of the Empty Tin

“Yes?”

“Uh huh.”

“What did you want to tell him?”

“Something he wants to know,” Mason said.

She flushed. “I didn’t mean it that way. Was it information about the patient?”

“Of course.”

“He won’t be able to see you right now. It may be an operative case. They telephoned the doctor from Los Angeles and again from the airport. He’d been waiting for the call.”

“What’s that doctor’s name?” Mason asked. “I wasn’t certain I caught it.”

“Dr. Sawdey.”

“His initials?”

“L. O.”

“I’ll be waiting here in the lobby. No. Perhaps I’d better go get in touch with the nurse. I think the information I have is something he wanted before he operated. Where will I find the patient?”

She said, “Just a moment,” plugged in a telephone, consulted a memo, said, “What room will Carr Luceman be in? It’s an ambulance case that just came in. Emergency operation. Dr. Sawdey. Oh, yes.”

She pulled out the line, said, “The patient will be in room three-o-four. Dr. Sawdey is preparing to operate. Go to the third floor, tell the nurse in charge who you are, and ask her to get in touch with Dr. Sawdey’s nurse.”

Mason nodded, said to Della Street, “Come on,” and walked across the lobby, down the corridor to the elevator.

“Third,” he said to the attendant.

Once on the third floor, Mason motioned to Della Street, led her down to the end of the corridor where there was a solarium. Now the room was darkened, and the wicker furniture, spaced with the rectangular efficiency of a hospital rather than the careless informality of a private home, seemed in its stiff silence to be occupied by white-clad ghosts.

Mason looked at the door of 304 as they walked past, said, “We’ll sit here for a while and watch.”

A nurse garbed in a spotless, stiffly starched uniform walked by on rubber heels, rustling her way efficiently down the linoleum-covered corridor. She vanished in the door of 304. A few moments later, a man in the middle fifties, clothed in a dark business suit, pushed open the door and walked in. Shortly after that, the man left the room again.

Mason waited until this man had left the room. A few moments later the nurse bustled out, then Mason touched Della Street on the arm. “Okay,” he said, “let’s go.”

They walked down the corridor, the faint smell of disinfectants in their nostrils. Mason paused before the door of 304, on which a sign said, “Dr. Sawdey,” and below that a printed placard reading, “No Visitors.”

Mason silently pushed open the door.

The man in the room lay in the hospital bed. The sheet-covered blankets were arranged with hospital efficiency over the thin figure. A dim night light made the shadows a backdrop against which the white, tired face on the pillow was sharply accented.

The man who lay motionless in the bed, his eyes closed, was Elston A. Karr.

In the hospital surroundings, with wax-like lids closed over the burning power of his hypnotic eyes, he seemed wasted, tired, as robbed of power as a burnt-out electric globe.

Mason stood in the doorway long enough to note that the bedclothes were rising and falling with the even respiration of a man who is sleeping under the quieting influence of a powerful narcotic. Then he closed the door, took Della Street’s arm, and tiptoed down the corridor.

“What does that mean?” she asked, as Mason pressed the button for the elevator.

“Don’t you know?” he asked.

She shook her head.

Mason said with a smile, “I’m still jealous of my reputation as a prophet. I don’t dare risk it, but I think perhaps we’ll drop around to Dr. Sawdey’s residence for a little chat.”

Mason’s taxicab slid to a stop in front of one of the newspaper offices. A brightly lighted office on the ground floor marked the Want Ad Department. A separate doorway to the street made it easy for persons desiring to place want ads to approach the long counter where two quick-moving young women waited on the persons who came in with ads to be placed in the classified column, or with answers to be delivered to advertisers.

Mason paid off the cab, said, “Might as well come in, Della, and help me look.”

One of the young women behind the counter approached him. Alert eyes sized him up. She said, “What can I do for you?”

“I’d like back copies of your paper for the last week. I just want to look at them here.”

She reached under the counter, took out a hinged stick through which had been filed copies of newspapers.

“Do you have two of these?” Mason asked. “I’d like to have my secretary assist me.”

“You don’t wish to remove them from the office?”

“No.”

She walked down the counter a few feet, took out another file, and handed it to Della Street.

“What do we look for?” Della Street asked.

“We may not find it,” he said, “but I rather think we will. A small paragraph somewhere on an inside page, an account of a Mr. Luceman who was cleaning a revolver when it accidentally dropped and exploded. It will probably be written in a somewhat humorous vein. Dr. L. O. Sawdey will have been called in to give emergency treatment.”

Della Street, for the moment, did not look at the newspaper. Instead she looked at Mason, comprehension dawning on her face. “Then you mean that...?”

Mason interrupted her. “Once more I am not risking my reputation as a prophet. Let’s get the facts first, and make deductions afterwards.”

Mason plunged at once into the pages of the paper, but it was Della Street who found the notice first. “Here it is,” she said.

Mason moved over to look over her shoulder.

The article read:

It was an unlucky day for Carr Luceman who resides at 1309 Delington Avenue. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning when Luceman heard the noise made by a prowler trying to effect an entrance through the back screen door. Luceman sat up in bed to listen. The more he listened, the more certain he became that a prowler was cutting the screen.

Luceman, who despite his sixty-five years is a rugged individualist given to direct action, disdained to summon the police. He decided to teach the burglar a lesson he would not soon forget.

As Luceman expressed it, “I didn’t intend to try to hit him, but I most certainly did intend to give him the scare of his life.”

With this in mind, Luceman took a.38 caliber revolver from his bureau drawer, put on a pair of felt-soled bedroom slippers, and noiselessly tiptoed to the kitchen. As he opened the door from the dining room, he could distinctly hear the sounds of someone cutting through the screen on the back door.

Luceman cocked his revolver.

The doughty householder crept forward. Bearing in mind the admonition of a general who had exhorted his men to wait until the whites of the eyes were visible, Luceman tiptoed across the kitchen. He saw a dark form silhouetted against the screen of the back door — and promptly deposited his cocked revolver on the kitchen table — for the “burglar” was Luceman’s cat. Luceman had forgotten to give the animal its customary bowl of warm milk. The cat had sought to remind him by jumping to the screen. After hanging there for several seconds, it would drop back to the porch floor, then repeat the maneuver.

Luceman opened the back door, unlatched the screen, let in the irate cat, and approached the icebox in the kitchen. He had opened the door and was in the act of taking out a bottle of milk when the cat, purring in expectation of its deferred repast, jumped to the kitchen table and, in true feline manner, rolled over in squirming abandon. The cocked revolver teetered on the edge of the table. Luceman dropped the milk bottle, and tried to catch the weapon before it hit the floor. He was too late. The gun eluded his grasp. The bullet crashed into Luceman’s right thigh, inflicting a painful wound. The cat, frightened by the noise of the explosion, dashed out of the back door, and Luceman, painfully wounded, tried to crawl to the telephone. The shock and pain, however, caused him to lose consciousness, and it was not until nearly four A.M. that he recovered sufficiently to call Dr. L. O. Sawdey who lives in the neighborhood.