The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom

Seventeen

Mason, Paul Drake, and Della Street settled back on the cushions of the booth in the restaurant.

“I don’t think I can eat a thing,” Della Street said. “It’s ghastly.”

Mason, a confident smile on his face, said, “Don’t do that, Della. People are sitting all around us, watching us, wondering what we’re talking about, how we’re feeling. Keep smiling, keep confident, keep happy, make an occasional joke, and discuss what’s happening in low tones.”

“Exactly what is happening, Perry?” Paul Drake asked.

“I don’t know for sure,” Mason told him. “I’m afraid that the testimony of this man, Scanlon, is going to stampede that jury. I personally think Scanlon...”

“You surely don’t think Garvin actually did place that call, then get in his car and drive to Oceanside?”

Mason said, “I think Garvin was fool enough to get in his car and go somewhere. When you’ve cross-examined a lot of people on the stand over a period of years, you form an impression as to whether a man is telling the truth or lying just by the way he answers questions. Now, I’ll admit that while I managed to put Scanlon in a somewhat disadvantageous position, and while the police didn’t play fair in not having a line-up, the fact remains Scanlon is trying to tell the truth, and he gives me that impression.

“Now let’s suppose that he did have some difficulty in recognizing the man who was in that telephone booth putting through the call. Nevertheless, he isn’t at all dubious about the conversation which took place, and I know from experience the walls between those two booths are paper-thin. And the police must now have the record of that telephone call and it must have been to Ethel Garvin.

“Now let’s suppose for the moment Scanlon didn’t recognize Garvin when Garvin left the booth. Who else in that hotel could possibly have put through such a call to Mrs. Garvin?”

“When you look at it that way,” Drake admitted, “it’s pretty tough.”

Mason said, “I recognized at once that the weak point in Scanlon’s testimony was the statement he made concerning his recognition of the party he had seen leaving the telephone booth. Therefore, I concentrated on that. But you’ll note that I was particularly careful not to cross-examine him about the conversation itself. Naturally, I picked on the weakest link in the chain.”

“Well, for my part,” Drake said, “when Mrs. Garvin gets on the stand and swears absolutely that her husband was with her all night, I’d say the jury would be pretty apt to believe her.”

“Of course,” Mason pointed out, “you get into more trouble there. She’s fixing her time by the chimes on the clock and...”

“Didn’t she say she looked at her watch once?”

“Yes, but she definitely stated that she heard the chimes. Now suppose the chimes weren’t sounding. That, of course, brands her testimony as false right there.”

They gave that matter thoughtful consideration for a moment.

Mason threw back his head and laughed.

They looked at him in surprise.

“Come on,” Mason said, “a smile at least! Let’s pretend there’s been a joke about something.”

The others tardily joined him in half-hearted merriment.

“On the other hand,” Mason went on after a moment, smiling as though amused at some funny story he was telling, “the deadly part of the thing is that the question of whether there were chimes, or whether there were not chimes, depends entirely upon the testimony of the Señora Miguerinio. It all depends on what she thinks she did. Just as a person will quite frequently forget to wind a clock when he goes to bed, just as he will forget to put the cat out, so Mrs. Miguerinio may have forgotten to shut off the chimes on that particular night. If only I hadn’t gone to sleep at ten o’clock — if I had only stayed awake another half hour even, I could have told whether her testimony about shutting off the chimes was true.”

“That’s what comes of having a clean conscience,” Drake said. “You... wait a minute, Perry, here comes one of my men.”

One of Drake’s operatives stood in the doorway looking over the diners.

Drake held up his hand with his index finger extended, saying, as he did so, to Mason, “I told him I’d be here. He’s got a pipe line into one of the court attaches, who doesn’t have any idea this man is one of my operatives. He wouldn’t be coming here to look for me unless it was important.”

The man caught Drake’s signal, nodded, then walked casually back toward the men’s room.

Drake excused himself, and followed.

As Drake left the table, Della Street said to Mason, “Let’s hope this is a lucky break.”

“Let’s hope it is,” Mason said. “We can use a little luck.”

They waited tensely until they saw Drake returning.

Mason took one look at Drake’s approaching face and shook his head.

“What is it?” Della Street asked.

“Paul Drake has a mask of gloom an inch and a half deep all over his countenance,” Mason said.

Drake approached the table, and as lie started to slide in on the bench Mason said, “Smile, Paul.”

Drake’s lips twisted in a mirthless smile.

“What is it?” Mason asked.

“You’re licked,” Drake said.

“How come?”

“The D. A. has a surprise witness he’s going to throw at you. A service station attendant in Oceanside who put gas and oil in Garvin’s car.”

“What time?” Mason asked.

“Around eleven-thirty. Garvin was nervous and tense, pacing up and down, and while the car was being serviced, Garvin walked over toward the curb and watched the cars that were coming along the road headed south. He seemed to be looking for someone, and seemed to be as taut as a violin string. The service station attendant noticed him particularly.”

“How good is the identification?” Mason asked.

“One hundred per cent,” Drake said. “The man identifies the car, and he identifies Garvin. He noticed him particularly.”

“Well,” Mason said, “that’s certainly piling it on.”

“Why didn’t you ask Garvin about all this?” Drake asked.

“I didn’t dare to.”

“Why not?”

“The prisoners are given lunch in the jail by the sheriff. The deputy sheriff is supposed to whisk Garvin out of court immediately after the noon adjournment. He brings him back about five minutes before two.

“I didn’t dare to risk a conference with Garvin while the jury were there in the room, or while the spectators could see us. To have conferred with Garvin immediately following that testimony from Scanlon would have emphasized the disastrous nature of that surprise testimony. And having Garvin brought back to court early is about as bad. I can have a casual, whispered conference with him at about five minutes to two, and that’s all I dare to do.”

“Can’t you get an adjournment? Some sort of...”

“To try that would be considered as a confession of panic,” Mason said. “I’ve simply got to go into court, sit there with a smile on my face, and take it.”

“You’re going to have to take a lot,” Drake said.

“Well,” Mason told him, “I’ve dished out a lot in my time, so I guess I can sit there and take it if I have to. The grievance committee of the Bar Association wants to talk with me tomorrow night about my tactics in getting Mortimer Irving to identify my car as the one he saw parked by the side of the road. All in all, it’s a great life.”

“Can they do anything to you about that identification business?”

“I don’t think so. I contend I was absolutely within my rights. I had a right to talk with that witness, and I had just as much right to park one single car there by the side of the road and ask him whether that was the same car he had seen, as the police did to take Howard B. Scanlon to some position of vantage, and ask him whether or not the single man lie saw walking back and forth in the jail yard was the man lie had seen emerging from the telephone booth there at the hotel the night of the murder... Well, I guess there’s nothing much we can do here except put on an act of being carefree and happy. Then we’ll go up to court early. I’ll have a chance to ask Garvin a couple of apparently casual questions in the five minutes I’ll see him before court opens.

“All right, Paul, do you know any funny stories? People are watching us.”