The Case of the Fabulous Fake

13

In the consultation room at the County Jail, Diana regarded Mason with tear-swollen eyes.

“Have you had any trouble with the police?” Mason asked.

“They’ve been wonderful to me,” she said, “just so kind and considerate and— Mr. Mason, it wouldn’t hurt to tell them certain things, would it?”

“What things?”

“Well, about finding the money and about Edgar and about why I put the ad in the paper and—”

“And where would you stop?” Mason asked.

“Well, I suppose I’d have to stop somewhere. I suppose you’d want me to.”

“Of course,” Mason said, “you wouldn’t want to talk yourself right into the gas chamber. You’d want to stop sometime before you got there, but the trouble is you wouldn’t know where to stop.”

“Yes,” she said, “I suppose I’d have to, but they’ve been so nice and considerate and—”

“Sure,” Mason said, “that’s part of the technique. With some people they’re nice and considerate. With some women they’re perfectly gentlemanly and fatherly. Then, if that doesn’t work, they try the other tactic. They become hard-boiled and try all sorts of things.

“In recent years the courts have frowned on some of these police tactics, and the result is that they try to work up a case by getting the evidence rather than forcing the defendant to incriminate himself. But if anyone is willing to talk they’re always willing to listen and many a person has talked himself right into the penitentiary, and I mean many an innocent person. He’s made statements without knowing all of the facts.”

“But I know all the facts,” she said.

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Who killed Moray Cassel?”

She winced at the question.

“Did you?” Mason asked.

“No.”

Mason said, “Look here, Diana, you can be frank with me. I’m the only one you can be frank with. It’s my duty to see that you have a defense whether you’re innocent or guilty.

“Now then, you were to meet me on that six twenty-seven plane Thursday night. You didn’t do it. I saw you the next morning and you had quite a story about having been followed by someone whom you couldn’t shake off, someone who frightened you so you resorted to all sorts of evasive tactics and got there too late to catch the plane.

“Actually, you didn’t even try to catch that plane. That story that you made up about someone following you was a lie to account for what you had done with your time.

“I gave you the information that the blackmailer was Moray Cassel. I gave you his address. You decided that I was never going to pay off a blackmailer and that might not be the thing that your brother wanted. So, you took it on yourself to second-guess my play. You took a taxicab to the Tallmeyer Apartments. You went up to see Moray Cassel. While you were up there something happened. You opened your purse, perhaps to take out a gun. When you opened your purse, your BankAmerica credit card fell out and you didn’t miss it at the time.

“Later on you went to the airport. You wanted to buy your ticket to San Francisco and pay for it yourself, and that was when you missed your BankAmerica credit card for the first time.

“Now then, the police either know this much or surmise this much or can get evidence which will come pretty close to proving this much.”

She shook her head.

“Yes, they can,” Mason said. “The police are unbelievably clever. You have no idea what dogged footwork will accomplish in an investigation. They’ll find the cab driver who took you to the Tallmeyer Apartments.”

She gave a sudden, quick intake of her breath.

“Oh, oh,” Mason said, “that hurt... You little fool, do you mean that you took a cab directly to the Tallmeyer Apartments and didn’t try to cover your tracks?”

“I was in a terrible hurry,” she said. “I wanted to see him and then catch that plane with you. I thought I had time enough to pay him a quick visit and if... well, if... I was going to use my own judgment.”

“In other words,” Mason said, “if you felt that you could clean up the whole business with a five-thousand-dollar pay-off instead of putting that five-thousand dollars into the bank and getting a check to yourself as trustee, you were going to pay him the five thousand dollars and try to make a deal with him by which your brother would be out of trouble.”

“Well, yes...”

“Why didn’t you do it?” Mason said.

“Because he was dead.”

“Go on,” Mason told her.

She said, “I got into the apartment house. It was one of these hotel-type apartment houses where they have a doorman on duty at the elevator, but he was busy parking a car for somebody and I slipped right on by him into the elevator. I went up to the ninth floor. I found apartment nine-o-six. I tapped on the door.

“Nothing happened, so I tapped again and when nothing happened I tried the knob. I don’t know what in the world possessed me to do that but I did and the door opened and...”

“Just a minute,” Mason said, “were you wearing gloves?”

“I... no.”

Mason sighed and shook his head. “Go on,” he said.

“I got in there and at first I didn’t see him. I didn’t see anybody, but I said, ‘Who-whoo, is anybody home?’ and walked in. And then I saw him lying there on his back on the bed. Oh, Mr. Mason, it was terrible, terrible. Everything was soaked in blood and...”

“Was he dead?” Mason asked.

She nodded.

“How do you know?”

“I picked up his hand and it was cold.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I ran out.”

“No, you didn’t,” Mason said. “You opened your purse. Why did you open your purse?”

“Heavens, I don’t know, Mr. Mason. I... it’s just... I suppose I was crying or something and wanted a handkerchief... I can’t begin to tell you how I felt. It was... I was almost nauseated.”

Mason said, “You damn little liar. I have a notion to grab you by the shoulders and shake the truth out of you. Why did you open your purse?”

“I’ve told you, Mr. Mason. I’ve told you the truth.”

Mason said, “You either opened your purse to take out a gun or to put a gun into it. Which was it?”

She looked at him with sullen resentment. “You always try to cross-examine me!”

“Because you always try to lie to me,” Mason said. “Which was it?”

“I picked up the gun,” she said.

“That’s better,” Mason told her. “Now, why did you pick up the gun?”

“Because it was Edgar’s gun.”

“How do you know it was?”

“I know it. He had a twenty-two revolver that he used to carry with him when he’d go out on his fishing trips on account of rattlesnakes and things of that sort. It had a polished wooden handle or grip, or whatever you call it, and a little piece was chipped out and...

“Mr. Mason, it was Edgar’s gun. I know it when I see it. Edgar always wanted to teach me to shoot, and I’ve shot that gun hundreds of times.”

“So you picked up the gun and put it in your purse?” Mason said.

She nodded.

“And then what?”

“Then I tiptoed out of the room.”

“And what did you do with the gun?”

“I’m all right on that, Mr. Mason. Nobody’s ever going to find that gun. You can rest assured of that.”

“They may not need to find it,” Mason said.

“What do you mean?”

Mason said, “Every bullet which is fired through the barrel of a gun has certain distinctive striations or scratches that are made by peculiarities in the surface of the barrel. If the bullet that killed Moray Cassel was not deformed by striking bone and if the police can find where your brother had been target practicing, they can find some of the bullets which are embedded in a tree or a bank or whatever you used as a target. Then they can put those bullets in a comparison microscope and they may — mind you, I’m telling you they just may — be able to prove that the fatal bullet was fired from Edgar’s gun without ever having the gun.”

Her face showed dismay.

“However,” Mason said, “with a small-caliber bullet there’s not so much chance of that. Only you say you fired hundreds of shots. What did you use as a target?”

“Edgar had a target. He used to put it in the car. We’d put it up against a bank.”

“What kind of a target?”

“He used a dart target,” she said. “He had an old target that was made of some kind of a heavy cork, or something of that sort, and used it when he was shooting darts. Then after he quit shooting darts for pleasure, he put a backing of some kind of plywood on this target and then made some paper facings with a compass.”

“He was a good shot?”

“A wonderful shot, and he trained me so I became a pretty good shot.”

“Always with his gun?”

“Always with his gun. He was sort of a nut on wanting his women to be able to protect themselves. He wanted me to be an expert shot.”

“You don’t own a gun of your own?”

“No.”

“You’ve never had a gun of your own?”

“No.”

“Now, let’s be sure about that,” Mason said. “You’ve never made an application to purchase a revolver of any sort. Never had anyone give you a revolver?”

She shook her head in the negative.

Mason was silent for a while.

She said, “I don’t think you need to worry too much about that revolver, Mr. Mason. They’re never going to find it. Do you want me to tell you what I did with it so you can rest easy and—”

Mason held up his hand “Keep quiet,” he said. “Don’t tell me. Don’t tell anyone.”

“But if I tell you, it’s in confidence, isn’t it?”

“Some things you can tell me are in confidence,” Mason said. “But some things you can tell me would make me an accessory after the fact. I don’t want to know where that gun is. I don’t want anyone to know where that gun is. I don’t want you to ever tell anyone anything about a gun or about being in that apartment. Just keep completely quiet. Say that your attorney doesn’t want you to make any statement at this time, that a complete statement will be made sometime later.

“Then if they ask you how much later or anything of that sort you can tell them that it will be up to your attorney to fix the date.

“Where did Edgar keep this target that you mention?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere in his garage.”

“He had an individual garage?”

“Yes. The apartment house where he had his apartment was one of those where they had individual garages rather than a central basement garage.”

“And his car?” Mason asked.

“That was all smashed up in the automobile accident and was towed away by the police, I believe.”

“Did you see the car after the accident?”

“No.”

“Did you look in the trunk?”

“No.”

“You don’t know whether this target might have been in the trunk?”

“No.”

“It could have been?”

“Yes.”

Again Mason was thoughtfully silent. Then abruptly he got to his feet. “All right, Diana,” he said, “your future depends in large part upon keeping quiet and on an element of luck.

“You have taken it on yourself to disregard just about every bit of advice I’ve given you so far, and to try to substitute your own judgment in place of mine. Now you’re in a jam.”

“But I had to see Cassel,” she said. “Don’t you understand, Mr. Mason? You can’t afford to take chances with a blackmailer. You say that you don’t pay them and all that, but you know as well as I do that that’s a high-risk game.

“I didn’t want you to fight with this man and take a chance on doing something that would wreck Edgar’s life... And, of course, at that time I thought Edgar would recover.”

“The way you planned it,” Mason said, “would have been the high-risk game. You don’t get rid of a blackmailer by paying him off. That simply makes him more eager. It postpones the time of the next bite for a few weeks or perhaps a few months, but eventually the blackmailer is always back. He regards his hold on his victim as a certain capital asset, just like owning a government bond or having money in the bank.”

She shook her head. “I know that’s what lawyers always say but you can’t be sure. You don’t know what he wanted. You don’t know what his hold on Edgar was. It may have been something that... well, something that I could have protected him on.”

“In what way?”

“By paying off, I could have had negatives and prints of pictures and all that.”

“Negatives,” Mason said, “can be duplicated. Pictures can be copied. When you take the word of a blackmailer that you’re getting evidence, you’re trusting the integrity of the blackmailer and, for the most part, that’s a mighty poor risk.”

The lawyer pressed a bell button, signaling that the interview was over.

“What’s going to happen to me?” she asked.

“That,” Mason said, “depends upon many things. But I can tell you one thing, if you start talking, if you try to explain your actions, if you start confiding in the police, you’re either going to walk into the gas chamber or spend the better part of your life in the confines of a prison.”

“Can’t I be released on bail or something?”

Mason shook his head.

A deputy slid open the door. “All finished?” he asked.

“All finished,” Mason said. He turned and waved a reassuring hand to Diana Douglas.