The Case of the Buried Clock

Chapter 29

Back in his office, Mason opened a drawer in his desk, took out a bottle of rare old cognac, three large snifter glasses, said to Paul Drake and Della Street, “Well, now we can relax. At last I’ve got that damn clock off of my mind.”

“I don’t get it,” Drake said.

Mason laughed. “Suppose, Paul, we had found an alarm clock buried in the ground near a point where a man intended to plant a camera to take nocturnal pictures. Suppose we’d further found that one of the persons in the case relied upon a picture taken at night to establish an alibi. What would we have thought?”

Drake said, “Well, of course, if you put it that way.”

“That’s the only way to put it,” Mason said. “Those are the simple facts. Too many times we overlook the simple facts in order to consider a lot of extraneous complications which merely confuse the issue. I was responsible for it, Paul. It should be a lesson to me. I tried to work in a lot of stuff about sidereal time in order to get the district attorney of Kern County interested. Naturally, that stuff got into the newspapers, and naturally the murderer read all about it. Therefore, when he got ready to let me discover the clock, it was only natural he would set it on sidereal time.”

“But why would he want you to discover it?”

“Because I had started confusing the issues and he thought it would be a good thing to confuse them still more.”

“Just what do you think happened?” Della asked.

Mason said, “I can’t give you all the details, but I could make a pretty good guess. Vincent Blane had a magazine article lying around his house about how scopolamine would make witnesses talk, confessing crimes which they were really trying to conceal. Naturally, Vincent Blane read it; Martha Stevens, his housekeeper, read it; Adele Blane read it, and Milicent Hardisty read it. Probably all of them thought of that article when it became known that Jack Hardisty had embezzled another ninety thousand dollars and hidden it... Martha Stevens got her boy friend, went so far as to make a practical test. Martha got Milicent Hardisty to procure the drug for her, and then surreptitiously borrowed Milicent Hardisty’s gun. Remember, Martha learned of the second embezzlement from overhearing Blane’s telephone conversation.

“Milicent didn’t learn about the ninety thousand embezzlement until the day of the murder. When she found it out, she was furious. She obviously knew her husband was going to the cabin, and decided on a showdown. She couldn’t find her own gun, but her father had a gun that was in the house. She picked it up and started up to the cabin. That, however, was after Martha and Smiley had gone to the cabin. She parked her car near the turnoff to the cabin and then became hysterical, and the very force of the nervous storm served to calm her and give her a sane perspective on what she was about to do. She went back and threw the gun away, met Adele, started back to the house. Dr. Macon picked her up in Kenvale. She told him about what had happened. Macon wanted her to go back to the cabin, either to remove some evidence indicating she had been there, to find the gun she had thrown away, or because he didn’t entirely believe her story and wanted to check up on what had happened... They got to the cabin well after dark, unwittingly passing Martha and Smiley in the dark on the road, found Jack Hardisty dying. Milicent said she knew nothing about it. You can hardly blame Dr. Macon if he didn’t believe her.”

“But who killed him?” Della Street asked.

“Martha Stevens gave him a hypodermic of scopolamine,” Mason said. “When Jack told them about hiding the money in the tunnel, he wasn’t faking. He was telling them the simple truth. They went up to the tunnel, and the money wasn’t there. That means someone must have beaten them to it. That person must have removed the money almost as soon as Hardisty had buried it, and then gone on down to the cabin. We can reconstruct what happened then. He found Jack Hardisty drugged and talkative, telling the absolute truth under the influence of the drug. He found the car in which Martha and Smiley had driven up, and of course, Hardisty’s car was there also. Hardisty’s glasses were broken. He was probably sitting on that big rock outcropping, and the gun which Martha had surreptitiously taken from Milicent Hardisty was lying there on the pine needles where Smiley had thrown it when he hit Hardisty.

“Now this newcomer must have been a friend of Hardisty’s; more than a friend — a partner, an accomplice. And he must have been planning to kill Hardisty for some time.”

“How do you know that?” Della asked.

“The evidence shows it. When he’d planted that alarm clock the first time, he intended to use it to manufacture an alibi. But he didn’t use it because that day Beaton didn’t put the camera in that location, and, instead of staying to watch the cameras that night, he took Myrna Payson to a movie.”

“But why would this partner want to kill Hardisty?”

Mason smiled. “Put yourself in his place. Hardisty had got caught. Hardisty was going to jail. He was Hardisty’s accomplice — and if he had Hardisty out of the way, he’d not only seal his lips but be ninety thousand to the good with no one ever suspecting... The first embezzlement had been a scant ten thousand. That represented money they’d ‘borrowed,’ probably to finance a mining venture or horse races or stock gambling. The ninety thousand embezzlement was an attempt at blackmail, and it didn’t work.

“Put yourself in Burt Strague’s position. Jack Hardisty was going to the penitentiary. If Jack talked, Burt Strague would also go up as an accessory. He had intended to make away with Hardisty if he could do so safely. That’s why he first planted the alarm clock where he expected Rodney Beaton was going to set up one of his cameras. He was arranging in advance to give himself an alibi... He came on Jack Hardisty, drugged. Jack Hardisty probably told him he had left some incriminating evidence in that writing desk, evidence that showed the original embezzlement had gone into a joint venture with Burt Strague. And he also told Strague that Martha Stevens had drugged him and that he’d told them where he’d left the money, that he was tired of it all, that he didn’t have the nerve to go through with it. When Martha and her boy friend returned from the tunnel, Hardisty was going to tell them everything.”

“Where was Milicent all this time?” Drake asked.

“At that particular moment she was probably just parking her car at the turnoff, and starting to walk to the cabin. However, she never did get there. She had hysterics, went back to the road, threw the gun she’d taken with her — her father’s gun — away. She then met Adele, went back as far as Kenvale, met Dr. Macon, talked with him and finally returned to the cabin at Dr. Macon’s suggestion. Probably Macon wanted to find that gun — and he may have doubted if Milicent’s recollection of what had happened while she was hysterical was entirely accurate.

“When he arrived he found Hardisty in bed, dying from a gunshot wound. He naturally assumed Milicent, in her hysteria, had gone a lot farther than she remembered, and that a merciful amnesia had blanked the worst part of what had happened from her mind. That frequently happens in hysteria. In fact Legal Medicine and Toxicology by those three eminent authorities, Gonzales, Vance and Helpern, mentions hysteria as an authentic cause of amnesia. So you can begin to see Dr. Macon’s position. He felt certain the woman he loved had killed her husband, probably in self-defense, had become hysterical and the hysteria had erased the memory from her mind.

“But to get back to Burt Strague and Hardisty. There was an argument. Hardisty blurted out some things he shouldn’t have said. Burt Strague shot him, probably in a struggle. Then, alarmed, he got the wounded man up to the cabin and into bed. He realized Hardisty was dying. He knew that the mud on Hardisty’s shoes would show that he’d been to the tunnel. Naturally, he cleaned the shoes, because Burt had removed the money buried there in the tunnel almost as soon as Hardisty had driven away, and he wanted Martha and Smiley to think Hardisty had lied about the tunnel.

“Burt Strague knew that Martha Stevens and her boy friend would very shortly return from their fruitless search of the tunnel. He jumped in Hardisty’s automobile, drove it down the grade and off over the embankment. That got rid of the automobile... He didn’t have a chance to dispose of some of the other evidence, as he would have liked to. Not until the next morning did he get a chance to dig up his clock — and he had to burglarize the writing desk in the Hardisty residence. That was a ticklish job. When it came to doing it, he relied on the alibi he had already cooked up.”

“But how could he have left his picture in the camera,” Della Street asked, “if he wasn’t actually there?”

“Very easily,” Mason said. “With his own camera, he took a flashlight picture of himself walking along the trail. He kept that undeveloped negative in reserve. When Rodney Beaton set up his camera, which was probably right after dark, Burt, taking care to avoid tripping the string which would release the shutter, went up and left tracks in the trail. Then he unscrewed the first element of the lens, inserted the carbon paper disk, replaced the lens, and substituted his exposed film for the one that was in that camera. Remember that it was dark by this time, and he could work by a sense of touch without needing a darkroom. He buried his alarm clock, adjusted the mechanism so it would trip the string and shoot off the flashbulb at the proper time, and then beat it for Roxbury. Remember his slender build. He dressed himself in his sister’s clothes, slugged the guard, broke open the desk, got what he was after, returned to the mountains, removed the carbon paper disk from the lens, then went to the Blane cabin, and told the story of having searched all over for Rodney Beaton and his sister... Those are the high points. You can fill in the details.”

“But why was the clock twenty-five minutes slow when it was first found?” Drake asked.

Mason grinned. “Because, in order to make the thing work right, Burt Strague wanted to have his alarm clock synchronized with Rodney Beaton’s watch, and Rodney Beaton’s watch was notoriously inaccurate, so Burt made an excuse to get the time from Beaton and then set his own watch accordingly, and subsequently set the alarm clock according to that time... Once the clock was discovered, we might have tumbled to what it was all about if it hadn’t been for the fact that I, myself, mixed the case up by injecting this angle of sidereal time. Having done this to fool the police and the district attorneys of Kern and Los Angeles Counties, I then proceeded to get fooled by it myself, because the murderer promptly picked up my idea and adopted it as his own... And now, we’re going to quit talking about the case and have a drink of good old brandy.”

“What will they do?” Della Street asked.

“They’ll figure the thing out, give Burt Strague the third-degree, and probably get a confession,” Mason said. “Strague is something of a weakling, an introvert — the type that is emotional. He won’t be a hard nut to crack. I feel sorry for his sister, though. She couldn’t have known anything about it, and she’s a nice kid... Well, here’s to crime.”

The door from the outer office opened. Gertie said, “Mr. Vincent Blane is here. He says he must see you at once.”

“Show him in,” Mason said.

As Vincent Blane entered the office, Mason took another glass from the drawer of his desk.

“You’re just in time,” Mason said.

Blane was so excited he could hardly talk. “He confessed,” he said. “They got him. He told them all about it, and where he hid the ninety thousand he hijacked from the mine — and about planting that picture. It was an alibi so he could get into Jack’s home and—”

Mason said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Blane, we just finished a postmortem on the case, and decided we weren’t going to talk about it until we’d had one good drink.”

Vincent Blane seemed somewhat annoyed for a moment, then he grinned and dropped wearily into the big overstuffed leather chair. “At times, Mr. Mason,” he said, “you get some remarkably fine ideas. If there’s enough of that stuff in the bottle, let’s make it two good drinks.”