The Case of the Horrified Heirs (22 page)

Drake snapped his notebook shut. "All right," he said, "that's a job, but we'll get on it. I'll put a bunch of men on it and-"

"Wait a minute," Mason said. "You're not finished yet."

"No?" Drake asked.

Mason said, "Let's look at what happened after the car was crowded off the road, Paul."

"There were big rocks there," Drake said. "The chauffeur fought for control and lost out. The car toppled over into the ocean-you couldn't have picked a more perfect spot for it. I've checked it carefully. The road makes a left-hand curve there. As soon as you get off the shoulder, there are rocks-some of them eighteen inches in diameter-just regular rough boulders. There's only about ten feet between the road and the sheer drop straight down to the ocean.

"At that point there's an almost perpendicular cliff. The highway construction crews had to blast a road out of that cliff. It rises two hundred feet above the road on the left and it drops straight into the ocean on the right."

"Presumably," Mason said, "that's why this particular spot was chosen. It would be a perfect place to crowd a car off the road."

"That, of course," Drake said, grinning, "is elemental, my dear Holmes."

"Exactly, my dear Watson," Mason said. "But what happened to Lauretta Trent? The chauffeur told her to jump. Presumably she tried to get out of the car. The door on the left rear was unlatched. There was no body in the car; therefore, she must have been thrown clear."

"Well," Drake asked, "what does that buy us?"

"Her missing handbag," Mason said. "When a woman jumps from an automobile, she hardly bothers to take her handbag with her unless it contains a very, very large amount of money or something that is very, very valuable.

"That was why I had to find out from Eagan whether or not she was carrying something of great value. If she had a large sum of money or something of great value in her handbag, it's quite natural that she'd have told the chauffeur to be alert.

"Yet Eagan's surprise was too natural to be feigned. We're forced to the conclusion that, if there was anything of value in her purse or handbag, he knew nothing about it.

"Yet, when Lauretta Trent was faced with that moment of supreme emergency, that moment of great danger, she either grabbed up her handbag from the seat before trying to jump, or it was washed out of the car-otherwise it would be in the car.

"Now, my questioning about fifty thousand dollars being in the handbag will spur the police to go back and make a desperate search for that handbag with divers and submarine illumination. If the handbag is lying there among the rocks on the floor of the ocean, they'll find it. A body would be carried away by the ocean currents, a handbag would be trapped in the rocks."

Drake gave a low whistle.

"Then, of course," Mason said, "we come to the peculiar conduct of the heirs. Someone was trying to get Virginia to furnish a forged will which could be planted in the office copies of Bannock's wills."

"That is the thing that gets me," Drake said. "With a perfectly good will in their possession, why should anyone want to plant a forged will?"

"That," Mason said, "is what we are going to have to find out-and find out before ten o'clock tomorrow morning."

"And why the second spurious will?" Drake asked.

"That," Mason said, "is good practice in will forgeries, Paul. If in some way forged will number two is knocked out, then forged will number one has to be faced.

"Heirs are much more willing to compromise when they have two difficult hurdles to jump."

"Well," Drake said, "it's too much for me. I not only don't think we have the right answer, but I don't think we're even on the right track."

Mason smiled, "What track do you think we're on, Paul?"

"The one that makes Virginia blameless," Drake said.

Mason nodded thoughtfully. "As her attorney, Paul, that's the only track I can see."

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Back in his office, Mason said, "How about working late tonight, Della, and then having dinner?"

Della Street smiled. "You know I never go home until you do when we're working on a case."

Mason patted her shoulder. "Good girl," he said. "I can always depend on you. Put some paper in the typewriter, Della. I'm going to give you a list of questions."

"Questions?" she asked.

Mason nodded. "Somehow I have a feeling that I'm letting my client down in this case simply because I'm not using my head and breaking the case down to basic fundamentals.

"Someone in the background is carrying out a preconceived plan or, rather, has carried out a preconceived plan.

"That plan makes sense to him, but the outward manifestations of it, which we see in the light of events which have taken place, simply don't make sense.

"When that happens, it means we're looking at only a part of the picture. Let's start taking things up one at a time and trying to see if we can get answers.

"We'll start with question number one," Mason said. "Why did someone plant a shipment of contraband in Virginia Baxter's suitcase?"

Della Street duly typed the question.

Mason started pacing the floor. "First answer," he said, "and the most obvious answer is that this person wanted Virginia Baxter convicted of a felony.

"Question number two: Why did this person want Virginia Baxter convicted of a felony?

"First and most obvious answer is that he knew she was a subscribing witness to Lauretta Trent's will. He intended to do something which would indicate that will was a forgery and, therefore, wanted to be able to weaken her credibility as a witness.

"Question number three: Why did anyone go to Virginia Baxter and ask her to type two fraudulent wills?

"The obvious answer to that, of course, is that he intended to plant those carbon copies somewhere where they could be used to his advantage.

"Next question: Why could those spurious carbon copies be used to his advantage? What did he expect to gain by them?"

Mason, pacing the floor, paused, shook his head and said, "And the answer to that question is not obvious.

"Then we have the question: Why did Lauretta Trent want to talk with Virginia Baxter?

"The obvious answer to that is that she knew, in some way, conspirators were trying to use Virginia Baxter. Probably, she knew about the spurious wills. Or perhaps she just wanted to interrogate Virginia about the location of the carbon copies of the wills Bannock had drawn.

"There again, however," Mason went on, "we run up against a blank wall, because why would Lauretta Trent bother about any will which she was supposed to have executed years ago? If she had wanted to make certain her will was the way she wanted it, she would have gone to an attorney and inside of an hour have had a new will properly executed."

Mason paced the floor for a few minutes, then said, "Those are the questions, Della."

"Well, it seems to me you've got most of the answers," she said.

"The obvious answers," Mason said, "but are they the right answers?"

"They certainly seem logical," Della Street said encouragingly.

"We'll put one more question," Mason said. "Why in that moment of supreme danger did Lauretta Trent grab her handbag? Or, putting it another way, why wasn't Lauretta Trent's handbag found in the automobile when the car was fished out of the ocean?"

"Perhaps she had the strap of her handbag over her arm," Della Street said.

"She wouldn't have been riding with the strap over her arm," Mason said. "Even if she'd picked it up at the time of the collision, when she was catapulted into cold ocean water she would at least have tried to swim. When you try to swim, you're using your arms; and when you're using your arms under water, a handbag strap isn't going to stay over your arm."

"Well," Della Street said, "we have a rather imposing list of questions."

Mason paced the floor for a few minutes, said, "You know, Della, when you're trying to recall a name and can't do it, you sometimes think about something else and then the name pops into your mind. I think I'll try thinking about something else for a while and see what happens with these questions."

"All right," she said, "what else would you like to think about?"

"You," he told her, grinning. "Let's drive out someplace where we can have a cocktail and a nice, quiet dinner.

"How about going to one of the mountain resorts where we can sit in a dining room looking out over the lights of the city and feel far removed from everyone and anything?"

"And I take it," Della Street said, pushing back her secretarial chair and putting a plastic cover on the typewriter, "we take this list of questions and answers with us?"

"We take those with us," Mason said, "but we try not to think about them until after dinner."

CHAPTER TWENTY

Della Street, seated across the table from Perry Mason, regarded him solicitously.

The lawyer had eaten his broiled steak mechanically, as though hardly knowing what he was putting in his mouth. Now, he was sipping after-dinner black coffee, his eyes fixed on the dancing couples who glided over the floor. His gaze was not following any particular couple but his eyes were focused on the sea of lights visible in the valley below through one of the big windows.

Della Street's hand crept across the table, rested reassuringly on the lawyer's hand. Her fingers tightened.

"You're worried, aren't you?"

His eyes swiftly flashed to hers, blinked as he got her in focus, and his sudden smile was warm. "Just thinking, that's all, Della."

"Worried?" she asked.

"All right, worried."

"About your client, or about yourself?"

"Both."

"You can't let it get you down," she said, her hand still resting on his.

Mason said, "A lawyer isn't like a doctor. A doctor has scores of patients, some of them young and curable, some of them old and suffering from diseases that are incurable. It's the nature of life that individuals move in a stream from birth to death. A doctor can't get so wrapped up in his patients that he suffers for them.

"A lawyer is different. He has relatively fewer clients. Most of their troubles are curable, if a lawyer only knew exactly what to do. But whether they're curable or not, a lawyer can always better his client somewhere along the line if he can get the right combination."

"How about yourself?" she asked.

Mason grinned and said, "I led with my chin. I knew, of course, that someone had taken Virginia's car and that it had become involved in an accident. I felt that it was a trap and someone had made an attempt to frame her.

"If that had been the case, I was perfectly justified in doing what I did.

"As a matter of fact, I was justified anyway. I didn't know any crime had been committed. I did know that an attempt had been made to frame a crime on Virginia a short time earlier and I was trying to protect-Of course, if I'd known a murder had been committed and the car had been involved, then my actions would have been criminal. After all, it's a question of intent."

The lawyer glanced back to the dance floor, his eyes followed a couple for a moment, then again became focused on the distance.

Abruptly he turned to Della Street and put his hand over hers. "Thanks for your loyalty, Della," he said. "I'm not much on putting those things into words. I guess perhaps I take you too much for granted, like the air I breathe and the water I drink, but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate all you do."

He stroked her fingers.

"Your hands," he said, "are wonderfully reassuring. You have competent hands, feminine hands but, nevertheless, strong hands."

She laughed self-consciously. "Years of typing have strengthened the fingers."

"Years of loyalty have strengthened the meaning."

She gave his hand a quick squeeze; then, aware that they were attracting attention, abruptly withdrew her hand.

Mason started to look at the distant sea of light again then, suddenly, his eyes widened.

"An idea?" she asked.