Erle Gardner - The Case of the Rolling Bones

“Dessert?” the waitress asked.

“Bring me ice cream,” Mason said, “and the check to him,” indicating Serle.

Serle scraped his plate and pushed it back with a gesture of irritation.

“Your food won’t agree with you eating hastily that way,” Mason cautioned.

Serle said, “This is a hell of a way to act. I had to talk my head off in order to get a free hand, and now you start getting hard.”

Mason said, “I’m always hard,” and moved back to let the waitress scrape crumbs from the tablecloth.

Serle said, in a surly voice, “Bring me apple pie a la mode, and lots of coffee.”

“Yes, sir,” the waitress said and moved away.

Mason hitched his chair around so he was sitting sideways to the table, crossed his long legs, and smoked with every evidence of enjoyment.

“You couldn’t drag that in on cross-examination anyway,” Serle said.

“Oh, you’d be surprised at what a good lawyer can do on cross-examination,” Mason observed affably. “You can ask a man a lot of embarrassing questions. You can impeach his veracity. You can show that he’s been convicted of a felony and...”

“Well, I haven’t been convicted of any felony,” Serle snapped.

“No,” Mason told him with a smile, “but you could be before the case came to trial. The federal men work fast, and murder cases usually drag along... particularly when a lawyer has some reason for dragging ’em along.”

Serle said, with a burst of temper, “I smelled a rat on the Drake remittance right after we’d made delivery. I’d just taken over the business. I didn’t know all of the customers. He wrote a letter which led me to believe...” His voice trailed away into sulky silence.

“I know,” Mason said. “Tough, isn’t it? A man always hates to go to jail thinking he’s been a sucker.”

Serle said, “I’m not a sucker.”

“You’re being one right now,” Mason said.

The waitress brought their dessert. Mason started eating his ice cream.

Serle pushed his pie to one side, and said, “Oh, all right! Have it your own way. I’d known Louie off and on for several years. He picked up the agency for this loaded dice business. I’d worked out a sweepstakes proposition. I figured I could combine ’em. Louie wouldn’t sell me an interest.

“Then Louie wanted to get out. He told me he’d made a killing, had picked up twenty grand on the first installment, and said he was going to get a hundred before he quit.”

“Blackmail?” Mason asked.

“What do you think?”

“I’m not thinking,” Mason said, finishing his ice cream. “I’m listening.”

“Of course, it was blackmail! It was a sweet hookup.”

“Know what he had on Leeds?” Mason asked.

“Of course not. You don’t think Louie was that simple, do you? When a man has a gold mine, he doesn’t give his friends a chance to jump the claim.

“Well, I bought the business. I thought it would be a good thing to move it, but I kept the name because it was a mail-order business.”

“Go ahead,” Mason told him.

“The law raided my dump. I was out. They picked up a lot of incriminating stuff, but couldn’t prove any deliveries. My assistant was smart enough to dump the tickets where they’d be absolutely safe.”

“The officers will pick up your mail as it comes in,” Mason said.

Serle laughed. “That’s what you think. As soon as I heard about it, I beat it to the post office the very first thing and left a change of address. There won’t be a single letter come into the dump.”

“Nice going,” Mason observed.

Serle looked pleased with himself.

“Then what?” Mason asked.

“Then, of course, I went to Conway. I was sore. I thought he’d sold me something hot.”

“What did Conway say?” Mason asked.

“Conway was worried. He said he’d bail me out, that the thing had been clean as a hound’s tooth when he sold it to me. Naturally, I told him it was Leeds that was responsible for the police tip-off. He said it couldn’t be. I told him it was, and that it was up to him to square the rap.”

“Just what did Conway say?” Mason asked.

“He said, ‘Tell you what you do, Guy. Hide out until I have a chance to get things fixed up the way I want ’em. It’ll probably take me a couple of hours, but it may be a little sooner. Give me a ring, and I’ll let you know when to come up. Then you come up to my apartment, and we’ll talk things over.’ I told him I didn’t want to talk things over, I wanted action. He told me to come up, and I’d get action.”

“So you went up?” Mason asked.

“Yes, I went up. I was pretty nervous. Louie was busy as a one-armed paper hanger, answering the telephone, and scribbling a bunch of figures. Neither of us had eaten, and Louie gave me the number of a restaurant and told me to have some grub sent up. He said he could only give me a few minutes while we were eating. He said he was putting over a couple of big deals.

“While we were guzzling grub, Louie said to me, ‘Now listen, Guy. I dropped most of that twenty grand I made in the touch from Leeds, but I’m resourceful and I stick by my friends. Now I don’t want you to know anything about this — it wouldn’t be good for you — but a party’s going to be in here a little before ten with some dough — lots of it. Now, suppose you call me up and get an okay to be sure there’s no hitch. Then go down to jail, be booked, put up a cash bond, and walk right out.’”

Mason stared at the tip of his cigarette. “You say Louie had a lot of other things he was doing?” he asked.

“Yes. The phone rang two or three times, and he put in a couple of calls.”

“What were they?” Mason asked.

Serle said, “I can’t help you much there. I had my own problems to worry about. Some of it was dope on the horses. Some of it wasn’t. I remember he told somebody that things had been all settled up, and there wasn’t going to be any trouble. He said, ‘Why don’t you come on down, and let me talk it over with you?’ And then he said, ‘Well, I could run up for just a minute. I don’t want to be away more than a minute or two, but I can run up if you want.’ And then he said, ‘Well, that’s all right then. You come down, but don’t do it before ten o’clock. I’m going to be busy until after ten o‘clock.’”

“Anything else?” Mason asked.

“There were lots of calls. I can’t remember all of them. One of them was from his girl. She seemed to be all steamed up about something, and he was trying to smooth her over with a lot of yes-yes stuff. Hell, Mason, I can’t remember all that junk. If I’d known he was going to get bumped off, I’d have listened, but all I wanted was to find out where I stood.”

“Go on from there,” Mason said.

“That’s about all there is to it,” Serle told him. “I left there right after we’d eaten, went down to a poolroom I knew, and hung around there until ten o’clock, then I called Louie, and he said everything was okay, that he’d stick around and wait for me to call from the station, jump in a cab, come down and put up the bail, and that would be all there was to it.”

“Did you call the police immediately after that?” Mason asked.

“No, I didn’t. I wanted a little time to go over what I was going to tell the law. I played a game of pool and figured things out. I can think better while I’m knocking the ball around.”

“What time did you call Louie?” Mason asked.

“Right around ten o’clock.”

“As late as ten-thirty?” Mason asked, casually.

“Hell, no, it was ten o‘clock. Christ, he told me to call at ten, and I called at ten. When a guy’s going to put up the cash to spring you on a felony rap, you don’t let half an hour slip through your fingers.”