The Case of the Lonely Heiress

Chapter 22

Mason, seated in his office, grinned across at Della Street, said, “Della, I think this calls for a celebration. The Ice Follies are here this week. Get four of the best seats available, and make arrangements for a table at our favorite night club.”

Della Street moved toward, the telephone.

She had just completed the call when Paul Drake’s code knock sounded on the door.

Della Street opened the door.

Drake came into the office, assumed his favorite position in the big leather chair, scratched his head, and said, “How the hell you do it is beyond me!”

Mason grinned. “A murder case is simply a jigsaw puzzle, a lot of things to be put together. If you have the right solution, all of the parts fit into the picture. If some of the parts don’t seem to fit, it’s a pretty good indication you haven’t the right solution.”

Della Street said, “You’re stepping out tonight, Paul. You and Marilyn Marlow, the Chief and I are going to see the Ice Follies and then make a little whoopee at a nitery.”

“Okay by me,” Drake said. “She’s a pretty good-looking kid, that girl!”

“Unfortunately, Della,” Mason said, “you’re jumping at conclusions.”

“You told me a table for four,” Della Street said, puzzled.

“It isn’t Paul Drake we’re taking. Kenneth Barstow will be the fourth in the party.”

“Well, I like that!” Drake exclaimed.

“I really like it,” Della said. “I was becoming somewhat concerned over the turn events were taking. You should have seen the Chief’s face when Judge Osborn announced that the case against Marilyn Marlow was dismissed.”

“What about his face?” Drake asked. “An expression of relief?”

“Expression of relief, fiddlesticks!” Della Street exclaimed. “An expression of lipstick! You’d have thought he was Marilyn Marlow’s Prince Charming.”

“Beating Kenneth Barstow’s time?” Drake asked.

“It begins to look like it,” Della said, smiling. “Of course, the poor girl was hysterical. And then again, when you come right down to it, the affection between Marilyn Marlow and Kenneth Barstow has so far been one-sided.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” Drake said. “Barstow fell for her like a ton of bricks. He was biting his fingernails clear down to the knuckles when it looked as though they had her booked for a one-way trip to San Quentin.”

“Anyway,” Della Street told him, “you should be willing to forego an evening at the Ice Follies in order to give one of your operatives a break.”

“It might mollify me,” Drake said, “if Perry would tell me how he knew what happened.”

Mason said, “The thumbprint was the payoff.”

“How did you know it was Palmer Endicott’s fingerprint? I thought Ralph had pretty well established that it was his print.”

Mason said, “Palmer Endicott is clever, don’t make any mistake about that. Apparently he was the one who engineered the whole thing. Let’s just look at the evidence for a second:

“Rose Keeling’s fountain pen had a soft point. She shaded the lines in her signature and she shaded the lines in the writing on the check. But Ralph Endicott was able to show me a clear carbon copy of a letter she had written in pen and ink to Marilyn Marlow. Her soft-pointed fountain pen couldn’t possibly have made such a carbon copy. That letter had been written with a ball-point pen. You realize, of course, that these ball-point pens use a different type of ink from that used by the fountain pen. The fingerprint on the back of the check was one which had been made with ink from a ball-point pen.

“Ralph Endicott said it was his fingerprint. Apparently Ralph Endicott had had the only contact with Marilyn Marlow. Palmer wasn’t supposed to know her at all. Ralph Endicott had a perfect alibi. Palmer Endicott apparently had none. Therefore, once it appeared that Palmer Endicott had left a thumbprint on the check, the whole case was cracked wide open.

“The significance of that fingerprint hadn’t occurred to any of them until I went out to the Endicott house and Ralph Endicott told me his story of what had happened, a purely synthetic concoction of fact and fiction blended into the story the Endicotts had decided to tell. Then I called attention to the fingerprint on the check, and, of course, Ralph Endicott had to insist it was his.

“I asked him to verify that statement.

“Ralph Endicott wasn’t a fast thinker. He didn’t see any way out of that predicament. Probably he would have tried to become indignant at the thought of my doubting his word and asked me to leave the house. That, however, would have been rather a transparent subterfuge.

“Palmer Endicott was a fast thinker. He realized instantly that the fingerprint on the check must have been the fingerprint of his right thumb, so he gave Ralph Endicott the cue right under my nose, and did it so cleverly that for the moment he fooled me.

“Palmer Endicott insisted that Ralph stamp his fingerprints on a piece of paper and give the paper to me, and Palmer Endicott went into the next room to get a sheet of paper and an ink pad. He brought the sheet of paper back and showed it to us casually, so that we could see that it was blank. But, of course, when he held the sheet of paper, he was holding it with his right thumb and forefinger, and he had inked his right thumb before he picked up the piece of paper. Therefore, when he laid it down, the imprint of his right thumb was on the paper.

“I don’t think Ralph Endicott understood what was up, but in order to stall along, he went over to the table to go through the motions of making his fingerprints, hoping that before he gave them to me some idea would occur to him and to one of the others, so that they wouldn’t have to submit to fingerprints for my examination.

“When Ralph Endicott got over to the table, he found not a blank piece of paper, but a piece of paper with Palmer Endicott’s right thumbprint on it and immediately realized what had happened. He knew then that he was safe, so he made the imprints of the four fingers of his right hand and of all five fingers of his left hand, and then brought the paper over to me. I compared the fingerprints with those on the check and saw that the print on the check was a right thumbprint which coincided with the right thumbprint on the sheet of paper which had been handed me, and naturally assumed it was Ralph Endicott’s print. In the meantime, Palmer, under the guise of mixing a drink for us, had gone out toward the kitchen, where he had a chance to wash all trace of ink from his right thumb.”

“My God,” Drake said, “that was clever!”

“You bet it was clever,” Mason agreed. “Palmer Endicott is clever. He had to ad lib that whole performance, and he did some mighty fast, accurate thinking.

“Once I figured out the riddle of that thumbprint,” Mason went on, “the rest of it was easy. Rose Keeling was a nurse. One would hardly expect her to carry a bank account that had an idle balance of over a thousand dollars. But if the statements contained in that letter she wrote Marilyn Marlow and those made by the Endicotts had been true, her bank account would have shown a rather substantial balance for some time prior to the time the letter had been written.”

“You don’t mean the letter was a forgery, do you?” Drake asked.

“No, the Endicotts bribed her to write that letter. They gave her a thousand dollars in cash, and she wrote the letter in her own handwriting. The Endicotts naturally assumed Marilyn Marlow wouldn’t make the letter public, so they had Rose Keeling use a ball-pointed fountain pen that would make a clear carbon copy, and kept the carbon copy for their own protection.

“Rose Keeling took the thousand dollars, wrote and signed the letter, mailed it, gave the Endicotts a carbon copy and then went to the bank to deposit the thousand dollars. After she’d slept on it, she became repentant. She telephoned the Endicotts and told them she wasn’t going to go through with it, and that they could come and get the thousand dollars back. When she told them that, she signed her death warrant.

“Ralph Endicott proceeded to build himself an alibi. Palmer Endicott went up to meet Rose Keeling. He doubtless would have preferred to have had the thousand dollars returned to him in cash, but Rose Keeling insisted that it be in the form of a check because she had deposited the money in her bank the day before.”

“But why didn’t Palmer Endicott simply destroy the check?” Drake asked.

“Because the Endicotts weren’t sufficiently affluent to enable him to do so. They simply couldn’t afford to kiss that thousand goodbye. Palmer Endicott’s ingenious mind concocted a story that would account for everything. Under that story, the check, in place of being evidence that would incriminate the Endicotts, would become evidence that would incriminate Marilyn Marlow. But a check is no good after the person who issues it is dead, and Palmer Endicott wanted to be sure that they got that thousand dollars back. So he left Rose Keeling’s apartment with the check, went to Ralph Endicott and told Ralph to cash the check. After the check had been cashed, Palmer planned to return and murder Rose Keeling before Rose had an opportunity to communicate with Marilyn Marlow and confess that the letter she had written Marilyn was the result of a bribe.

“You see, it became necessary for Palmer to get in touch with Ralph, and for Ralph to have an alibi, because they all intended to swear that Ralph had been the one who had called on Rose Keeling. So Palmer had Rose make the check payable to Ralph. Therefore, it was necessary for Ralph to endorse the check personally and present it at the bank. In fact, when Palmer met Ralph, he probably went so far as to take out his fountain pen and hand it to Ralph so that the check could be properly endorsed, and it was then he got his thumbprint on the check.

“But Ralph said why not simply get the check certified? Then they could use it as evidence, and the fact that the check had been certified before Rose Keeling’s death would make it as good as gold.

“So Ralph went to the bank and had the check certified, and after it had been safely certified, Palmer Endicott went out to murder Rose Keeling. That was where Palmer had a break. In place of ringing the doorbell and persuading Rose Keeling that she should admit him, he found the door open.”

“Left open by Dolores Caddo?” Drake asked.

“That’s right. Dolores had been there. She’d made a scene. She’d thrown ink from her fountain pen on Rose Keeling. Rose had dashed into the bathroom and locked herself in, but not before the ink had got on the playsuit she was intending to wear while she was playing tennis with Marilyn; and not before Dolores had ripped the playsuit half off her.

“Then Dolores Caddo, feeling she had done enough damage, went out and left the door open. Rose Keeling, locked in the bathroom, decided her unwelcome visitor had gone, so she stripped off the torn, ink-stained playsuit, put it in the soiled clothes hamper and climbed into the bathtub to wash off whatever ink stains had been on her body.

“Palmer found the outer door open. He closed it, slipped up the stairs and found Rose Keeling in the bathroom. He ambushed himself so that he could stab her as soon as she emerged from the bath. At about that time the phone started ringing. It was the call Della Street was putting through for me. It didn’t suit Palmer’s purpose to have the phone continue to ring, because Rose Keeling might dash out of the bathroom on the run to pick up the receiver. She would find Palmer Endicott ambushed in her apartment and start screaming. And if she came out of the bathroom on the run, Palmer wouldn’t be able to tap her on the head before she knew he was there.

“So Palmer stepped into the other room, lifted the telephone receiver off the cradle, then went back to wait for Rose Keeling. When Rose emerged from the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her, Palmer stepped forward. She probably dropped the towel and gave one jump, but Palmer smashed her over the head with a blackjack. Then he stabbed her, withdrew the knife, and left the flat, taking care to leave the outer door just as he had found it when he entered.”

“What about the cigarette burn?” Drake asked.

“When Dolores Caddo called on Rose Keeling, Rose was smoking a cigarette. She had probably just lit it. It dropped from her lips when Dolores grabbed at Rose Keeling’s playsuit and tore it. The cigarette lay there unnoticed and burned a place in the floor. Later on, when Palmer Endicott entered the place, he was smoking a cigar. An inveterate cigar smoker invariably wants to quiet his nerves with a good cigar when he’s about to engage in some particularly desperate undertaking. But when Palmer found Rose Keeling was in the bath, and realized he had an opportunity to ambush her, he felt that the odor of cigar smoke in the apartment might betray him, so he ground out the cigar by pressing the end against the sole of his shoe, and probably put the unsmoked portion in his coat pocket so it wouldn’t betray him.”

Drake, who had been listening carefully, nodded thoughtfully.

“So you see,” Mason said, “once you get the correct solution, all of the evidence fits into place. Or, looking at it the other way, once you fit all the evidence into place, you have the correct solution.”

“What about Marilyn Marlow’s ad?” Drake asked.

Mason chuckled, and said, “You can see what happened there. Marilyn Marlow had a pretty good idea that the Endicotts were bribing Rose Keeling. She wanted to get the evidence. She thought the way to do it was to get Rose Keeling to fall for some young man who would, however, be loyal to Marilyn. It was an amateurish way of going about it. She should have hired a professional private detective to do her snooping.”

“That’s right,” Drake said.

Mason went on, “She’ll probably make arrangements for one tonight. Tell Kenneth Barstow he has to go out on a job. Don’t tell him what the assignment is.”

“You’re a hell of a cupid,” Drake said. “You get these two young people together and then provide them with a couple of chaperones.”

Mason said, “That shows all you know about it, Paul. Tonight Della and I are going to forget all about business and business relationships. We’re going to be completely carefree and romantic.”

Drake heaved himself out of the big chair.

“Okay,” he said. “Go to it, you youngsters. While you’re doing that, I’ll be sitting in my office, slaving my fingers to the bone.”

“Doing what?” Mason asked.

“Making up a fat expense account in the Marilyn Marlow case,” Drake said. “With a whole evening at my command, I’ll think of a lot of things to put in it. After all, the gal’s an heiress, isn’t she?”

“She sure as hell is now,” Mason said.