The Case of the Borrowed Brunette

Chapter 21

Paul Drake and Della Street were sitting in Mason’s private office when the lawyer unlocked the door and entered.

“Gosh, Perry,” Paul Drake said, “it’s ten o’clock. Did they give you a good sweating?”

Mason grinned. “They sweated the truth out of me.”

“What do you mean?”

Mason said, “I was darn near asleep at the switch, Paul. It took the jolt of your message about that key to jar me into realizing the truth.”

“Go on. Shoot.”

“We were all hypnotized because we had been given an erroneous time factor. Because the murder was committed in the apartment house with a weapon that left that building at eleven minutes past two, we naturally assumed that the murder had been committed before that. And Adelle Winters didn’t help any. She’s a most terrible liar. Whenever the going gets rough she hides from the facts. Because she felt certain the murder had been committed while she was down in the lobby at the apartment house, she told about seeing an empty shell in the gun and smelling powder. Actually, she did no such thing, but she wanted to have some good reason which would explain why she ditched the gun and, of course, she felt certain the gun had been fired at that time.”

“Hadn’t it?”

“Gosh, no!”

“It was in the garbage pail after that.”

“Actually, the revolver made another trip back to the apartment house and then back to the garbage pail.”

“Who did it?”

“Orville Reedley. He went to the hotel to see what Adelle Winters had been looking for in the garbage pail. Actually, he assumed she might have dropped something in and wanted to see what it was. He found a gun lying on top of the garbage. He was the only one who knew that the revolver was in the garbage pail. And as it happened, he was smart enough to realize that he could take that gun, go kill the man he wanted out of the way, and have a perfect setup to blame the crime on someone else. Where he slipped up was in leaving the print of his right index finger and his ring finger on the inside of the metal handle on the garbage pail. Once they took his fingerprints and compared them with the developed latents on the garbage pail, there was nothing to it.”

“How about the wallet that Adelle Winters took — if she did take it?” Della Street asked. “That’s what’s bothering me.”

“It bothered me too,” Mason admitted, “and it bothered Gulling. The story about that wallet is really good.”

“What is it?”

“After Orville Reedley had pulled the trigger, he realized that he might plant a little additional evidence if he could make it appear that the body had been frisked. He knew that someone was going to discover the body; he thought it would be Adelle Winters. When he took the wallet from Hines’s pocket there was only four hundred and fifty dollars in it, and he wasn’t sure that would be considered enough to have tempted somebody to steal the wallet. The person he was laying for all along, of course, was Adelle Winters. He felt certain she’d be back. Understand, he didn’t know why the two women had left the apartment. It was his idea — as you know — that the woman who was occupying the place — the woman whose chaperone Adelle Winters was — was his wife. And it was Adelle Winters that he wanted to involve. So he cast some bread on the waters. He opened his own wallet, extracted thirty-one hundred dollars, pushed the bills into the wallet, then tossed the wallet into the bedroom and closed the door. And Adelle Winters did exactly what he hoped she’d do.”

“Then Reedley must have confessed,” Drake said.

“That’s right,” Mason told him. “When he was confronted with the fingerprint evidence, and as soon as it became evident that they really had a perfect case against him, he switched completely around with that emotional instability of his and told the whole story. The interesting part of it was that Gulling had another trump up his sleeve for me, just as I was afraid he might have. He tried to show that, because Adelle Winters was my client and because she had taken the wallet, under the law in regard to lost property that has been found, she was guilty of larceny. And that gave me a chance to play my trump card!”

“About Gulling’s finding your wallet with the money and the ‘code’ letter in it?”

“Not exactly,” Mason said. “I pulled that on him, but of course it was obviously a trap. I had meant it to be a dramatic courtroom gesture, in case he started an argument about the other wallet. The law provides that found property must be turned in within a ‘reasonable’ time, and I wanted to show what Gulling’s idea of a ‘reasonable’ time was. Also, I knew he would waste a lot of energy trying to decipher the ‘code’ in the letter I had Della write by hand — really the only kind of code that can never in the world be deciphered.”

“What kind is that?” Drake asked.

“A coded message that has no meaning,” Mason replied with a grin. “But after they had Reedley’s confession, I was in a beautiful position to teach Gulling some law.”

“How do you mean?”

“Reedley admitted that he had put his own money in the wallet and tossed it on the floor. And because the money already there was in tens and twenties only, and Reedley wanted to have it all in bills of high denomination, he put that money in his pocket and replaced it with bills of his own before he tossed the wallet on the floor. Therefore, when Adelle Winters picked it up, she wasn’t ‘finding’ anything within the meaning of the law.”

“What was she doing?” Della Street asked.

“Taking possession of property that had been abandoned,” Mason said. “There’s quite a distinction in law between lost property and abandoned property. When Reedley tossed his own money on the floor, he had abandoned it.

“When property has been lost, the owner retains title but is deemed to have parted with the property accidentally. When property has been abandoned, it is deemed to have returned to the public domain, and the first person who takes it into his possession is entitled to retain not only the property itself but the title to it.

“Gulling is shrewd and keen, but he isn’t a fast thinker. He got his feet wet trying to nail me as an accomplice on the purse business before I sprang my point. After I had sprung it, he recognized its logic, and that put him in a rather sorry light.”

“And what was finally done with the money?” Drake asked.

“I told Adelle Winters I’d take fifteen hundred dollars as a fee, and she could keep the other sixteen hundred as a souvenir,” Mason said. “And when I left, the Grand Jury were having a lot of fun. They all crowded around me, patted me on the back, and shook hands, and Gulling’s blood pressure ran up to two hundred and fifty!

“But this case has been too darn close for comfort. Gosh, Paul, here we were with the solution of the whole case fairly dangling in front of our eyes, and we couldn’t see it simply because we let that damn prejudiced assistant district attorney pick the time when he thought the murder must have been committed, and let him sell us on the idea. If I hadn’t suddenly started questioning the basic fact of the time element, we’d have been in a sweet mess.

“At that, next time I run across anyone who is borrowing a brunette, I’m going to let him keep her!”