The Case of the Nervous Accomplice

Chapter 11

Perry Mason pushed down on the foot throttle, sending his car whining up the steep grade. He brought it to a stop in front of the big three-storied house.

“You sit here, Della,” he said. “Shut the motor off. I’ll fire two shots. Press the horn button once if you hear one shot, twice if you hear two shots.

“After that, turn on the radio. I’ll fire two more shots. Give me the same signal.”

Della Street nodded.

Mason took a skeleton key from his pocket.

“Will the police frown on this procedure?” Della Street asked.

“What procedure?”

“The breaking and entry part, the skeleton key.”

Mason grinned. “I’m a stockholder in the company that owns the building. Even Hamilton Burger can’t find a loophole in that.”

“The police have finished searching the place?”

“Yes. They’ve been over it with a fine-toothed comb. They found one other bullet.”

“They did? When?”

“Late last night. It was embedded in the wall on the south side and had been fired from the fatal gun.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“I didn’t know it myself until this morning.”

“Then there’s only one other bullet to be accounted for?”

“Yes. The two bullets from the Peters’ shells have now been found. The U.M.C. bullet is missing.”

“Those are blank cartridges you’re using?”

“That’s right.”

“Do they make the same amount of noise as the ones with bullets?”

“I hope so,” Mason said. “I don’t dare to shoot any bullets to find out. We’ll make a reasonable test.”

“What do you want to prove?”

“Whether my client is lying.”

“If she isn’t?”

“So much the better.”

“And if she is?”

“She’s still my client,” Mason said, and fitted his skeleton key to the lock in the door.

Mason climbed the first flight of stairs, looked around at the gloomy rooms, inhaled the musty air, then started up the second flight, paused midway up the flight to inspect the reddish-brown stain which had soaked into the wood, marking the place where the body of George C. Lutts had been resting when discovered by his startled son-in-law.

He climbed to the third floor, looked out of the window down the steep slope to the place where Roxy Claffin’s house gleamed in the sunlight, a vision of white stucco, red-tiled roof, blue-tiled swimming pool, walled patio, green shrubbery and velvet lawns, the well-kept luxury of the place standing in sharp contrast to the contractor’s unpainted board shack at the foot of the grade where the raw earth had been ripped away.

Mason stood with his back to the window. He raised a thirty-eight calibre revolver and pulled the trigger twice. The echoes of the explosion died away. From down below came the blast of an automobile horn. A second later there was another blast.

Mason waited for a full minute, then raised the gun and fired two more shots. This time there was no sound of the automobile horn.

Mason pushed the gun back in his pocket and descended the stairs.

“Okay?” Della Street asked.

“Okay,” he said. “How plainly did you hear them?”

“I heard the two plainly. After that, nothing.”

“Were you trying to listen for the second two?”

“When the radio was on, I tried to sit back, listening to the radio the way a person would.”

“How loud did you have it on?”

“Pretty loud. Not blasting my eardrums out, but good and loud just the same.”

“In other words, you were trying to give our client a break?”

“Well... I suppose I was.”

“We can’t do it that way,” Mason said. “We have to know the real facts.”

He got in beside Della Street, turned the radio on, adjusted the volume. “Leave it just like that, Della.”

Again Mason climbed the stairs, waited a minute and fired two shots. This time there were two blasts from the horn below. They were short, as though Della Street had been reluctant to press the horn button.

Mason sighed, put the gun in his pocket and descended the stairs. He found Della Street sitting in the automobile, tears in her eyes.

Mason patted her shoulder. “Don’t take it too hard, Della. I had to know... that’s all.”

“I like her, Chief.”

“So do I, but we can’t control the facts.”

“Will the police make this experiment?”

“After she tells her story. You couldn’t hear the shots when the radio was loud?”

“No.”

“Would you have heard these last two if you hadn’t been listening for them?”

She wiped her eyes. “I’d like to say no, Chief, but that won’t help her. Yes, they came in very clearly.

“Of course,” Della Street pointed out, “she may say she was listening to some programme that was real noisy.”

Mason nodded without enthusiasm. “I’m not going to put any words in her mouth, Della. I’m just going to ask her.”

“The radio wasn’t left turned on when you and Doxey drove up?”

“No. She says she shut it off when she went in the house.”

“Where’s the car now?” Della Street asked. “A lot might depend on what station the radio indicator was on.”

“The police have the car. They’re making a belated search for fingerprints.”

“Finding any?”

“They’re not telling.”

“So what do we do now?”

“Now,” Mason said, “I think we’re ready to talk with Mrs. Doxey. I want to find out how it happened she told Mrs. Claffin about Sybil Harlan having retained me to throw a monkey wrench in the machinery.”

“That was a mean thing to do,” Della Street said, “right when Mrs. Harlan thought her husband was going to stand back of her, right when she thought Mrs. Claffin had been put in her place.”

Mason nodded.

“Chief, suppose Mrs. Harlan is telling the truth. Someone must have been concealed in that house, waiting for Lutts. After all, you know, Lutts was a pretty smooth operator, and there undoubtedly were people who didn’t like him.”

“Let’s look at the sheer mechanics of the thing,” Mason said. “The murderer fired at least two shots; one of them went into Lutts’ chest at a distance of about eighteen to twenty inches, the other one missed him and went into the wall. What would be the sequence of those shots?”

“What do you mean?”

Mason said, “After having shot Lutts in the heart at a distance of eighteen to twenty inches, the murderer would hardly have fired a second shot into the wall just for practice.”

She nodded.

“Therefore,” Mason said, “we have to assume the first shot was fired at Lutts and it missed him.”

Again Della Street nodded.

“So,” Mason said, “we try to reconstruct the conditions under which that first shot was fired. In all probability, Lutts had his back turned.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I think it’s logical. I don’t think his murderer would have pulled a gun, aimed and fired, if Lutts had been standing facing the murderer.”

“Well, he certainly was facing the murderer when the second shot was fired.”

“Exactly,” Mason said. “Which indicates that the first shot was fired when he had his back turned. Then that shot was a miss. Lutts must have whirled at the sound of the shot. He saw the murderer standing there, holding a gun. He could have done either one of two things. He could have tried to run away or he could have charged toward the murderer. Apparently he charged.”

“How can you tell?”

“Either he charged toward the murderer or the murderer charged toward him,” Mason said. “The first shot wouldn’t have been a miss at twenty inches. Therefore, the distance between the murderer and the victim must have been shortened materially between the time the first shot was fired and the time the second shot was fired.”

“That’s right,” Della Street said.

“So either Lutts was charging the murderer or the murderer was charging Lutts. Now then, at eighteen to twenty inches — and mind you, that’s twenty inches from the end of the gun to the chest of the victim — Lutts would have been trying to do something to protect himself.”

Mason took a tape measure from his pocket, said, “Get out, will you, Della? I want to try an experiment. Here, hold the gun.”

“It’s empty?”

“It’s empty. It was only loaded with blanks in the first place.”

Della Street took the gun.

“Point it at me.”

She pointed the gun.

“Now stretch it out just as far as you can reach with your hand.”

She pushed the gun out at arm’s length. Mason took a steel tape measure from his pocket, measured off twenty inches.

“See what I mean?” he said. “At this distance, I’d be knocking the gun out of your hand.”

“Unless I jerked my hand out of the way.”

“That would be pretty hard to do with a gun. Now, hold the gun closer to you.”

She crooked her elbow slightly.

“Closer,” Mason said. “Hold the gun right up against your body. Lower it to your hip. Remember, the course of the fatal bullet was upward. The murderer shot from the hip.”

She put the gun up against her hip. Mason measured off twenty inches from the gun to his chest.

“At this distance,” he said, “I could break your jaw before you could pull the trigger.”

“You might break my jaw and I might pull the trigger at the same time.”

“That,” Mason said, “is the thought I’m trying to explore.”

“So what do we do now?”

“So now,” Mason said, “we go talk with Mrs. Herbert Doxey. But first we telephone Paul Drake and find out which one of the possible suspects knew nothing about shooting a gun. Our murderer, whoever he was, must have missed that first shot at a distance of hardly more than ten feet.”