Erle Gardner - The Case Of The Dangerous Dowager

"All right," Drake said, glancing again at Mason, "that gives us a pretty good sketch of Duncan's character. What's that got to do with the suicide?"

"Well, when they started business," Manning said, "they took out one of these policies of business insurance by which each man insured his life in favor of the other for twenty thousand dollars. If one of them died, the twenty thousand dollars was to go to the other partner, who would use that twenty thousand to pay the heirs of the dead partner for the dead man's share in the business. That's usual in lots of partnerships, I understand. Anyway, that's what the insurance salesman told them. I was there when he talked with Sam. You see, when a partner dies, the surviving partner has to wind up the business and then he has to turn over half of the net assets to an administrator or something. That means that the business is wrecked, because the living partner isn't supposed to buy it in; but when the partners all agree on having an insurance provision of this kind, it's legal, and the other partner simply takes the twenty thousand, pays it over to the heirs in the form of cash, and that represents the value of the dead partner's share in the business. Anyway, that's the way the insurance man put it up to them, and..."

"Mason's a lawyer. He knows all about business and partnership insurance," Drake interrupted. "Go ahead and tell us the rest of it."

"Well, those policies had a provision that if a partner committed suicide within the first year, the insurance company only had to pay the amount of the premiums which had been paid in. On the other hand, if the death took place by violence or by accident, the surviving partner got double the face of the policy. Now then, you see where that leaves Charlie Duncan. If Sammy committed suicide, Duncan can't collect a cent under the policy except a few hundred dollars which were paid as premiums. He has to wind up the partnership business and he has to give one-half of all the assets to Sammy's heirs. But if he could prove Sammy was murdered, then he'd get forty thousand dollars instead of twenty. He could keep the whole partnership business, and he'd only have to pay over twenty thousand to the heirs.

"You see what I mean. When they took out the partnership insurance, the insurance had this clause about death by violence, but in the agreement they overlooked that and agreed on a payment of a flat amount of twenty thousand dollars, which one partner would pay to the other."

Perry Mason pursed his lips in thought, met Drake's significant glance and nodded his head.

"Go ahead, Arthur," Drake said.

"Well, Charlie's a quick thinker. Now, I'm just betting that as soon as he walked into that room and saw Grieb dead, he realized the position that he'd be in. I think he knew Sammy had been dipping into the till, and that was one of the reasons he was so anxious to have a receiver appointed.

"Now then. Charlie busted into that room and saw Sammy sitting at his desk, dead. He knew damn well it was a suicide, but Perry Mason, the lawyer, was right there in the office, and Charlie had a deputy United States marshal with him who had been called in to serve the papers on Sammy. Now, I think that Charlie knew there was evidence there which would prove Sammy had killed himself, and what he wanted was to ditch that evidence. In order to do it, he had to get rid of both this man Perkins and Perry Mason, and the best way he could think of was to pretend Perry Mason had bumped Sammy off, and, of course, to protect his own interests, he kept yelling murder right from the start. Charlie's an awfully smooth guy when he has to be. He's a fast worker and a quick thinker, and..."

"Yes, you've told us all that before," Drake interrupted.

"Well, the logical thing for Charlie to do was to make a build-up so he could accuse Perry Mason of murder and order Perkins to take Mason and lock him up somewhere. Now, Charlie knew just as well as I do - in fact a damned sight better - that it wasn't murder, that it was a case of suicide, but he wanted to get Mason and Perkins out of there, so he accused Mr. Mason of the murder and got Perkins and Mason to go out.

"Now, I was watching that runway which led to the offices, and I saw Perkins and Mason go out. I went in just a second after they went out. I told the officers that Charlie was looking around in the chair in the entrance room when I went in there, and that's the truth, but before I went in that room, Duncan had been in the room where Sammy's body was slumped over the desk. I know that because when I opened the door to the outer office I could hear the sound of someone moving fast on the other side of the door, just as though Charlie had come running out of that inside office.

"Now, I'd gone in there on an emergency signal. I didn't know what was up and when I heard all the noise of running feet I stopped long enough to get my gun out of my holster and into my fist. I wasn't going to walk in and have someone stick a gun in my ribs.

"My gun didn't come out easy, and maybe I was a little yellow. I hated like hell to push that door open the rest of the way, but I did it - and there was Charlie fumbling around in the chair, just like I told the officers.

"Now, I think that Sammy killed himself, that the gun had slipped down from his hand and was lying on the floor by the desk, that Charlie saw it there. He got rid of Mason and Perkins long enough to run in and pick up that gun. At first he intended to frame the killing on Mr. Mason. So he figured he'd slip the gun down in the cushions of the chair in which Mason had been sitting. But I came in there and found him fussing around that chair, and he didn't dare to do it then, because he was afraid I'd squeal. So he kept the gun in his pocket and ditched it later."

"How do you know what gun Grieb was killed with?" Mason asked.

Drake nodded and said, "That's the part that's important, Arthur. Just how do you know that?"

"Well," Manning said, "I know something about guns. I fooled around quite a bit with ballistics when I was in the army. The marks on a gun barrel fingerprint a bullet which goes through it just the same as a man's fingerprints on a piece of glass..."

"Yes, we know all about that," Drake said. "Go on."

"Something else that isn't so generally known," Manning said, "is that the firing pin leaves a distinctive mark on the exploded shell. Firing pins aren't centered dead to rights. They're always a little bit to one side or the other.

"Well, one day Charlie Duncan and Sammy Grieb got in an argument about who was the best shot. They were both army men. Charlie bet Grieb fifty bucks he could come closer to a mark than Sammy could. Sammy got sore and put up the fifty. I was in the room at the time and they used me as stake holder. We went below the casino into a long storeroom where there were some heavy timbers and put up a target."

"Who won?" Mason asked.

"Grieb did. That was where he outsmarted Charlie. Charlie's a crack shot, but Grieb was familiar with the gun and Grieb stipulated that they were only to shoot one shot apiece.

"Now, after I got to thinking about what might have happened, I went down there below decks and started prowling around. Sure enough, I found one of the exploded shells that had been ejected by the gun and dug one of the bullets out of this heavy beam. Now I can swear those bullets came from Sam's gun and that's the same gun that Sam was killed with."

Mason raised his head and said to Paul Drake, "Have you checked up on this, Paul?"

Drake nodded. "I've got a photograph of the exploded shell which they found on the floor in the room where Grieb was killed and checked the mark made by the firing pin with that on the shell Manning found down there in the passageway beneath the casino. There's no question but that they were both fired from the same gun."