The Case of the Runaway

Chapter 15

Mason, Della Street, Paul Drake and Talbert Vandling, seated around a table in the living room of Mason’s suite at the Californian Hotel, touched glasses.

“Here’s to crime,” Vandling said.

They drank.

“What gets me,” Vandling went on, “is the manner in which the Los Angeles district attorney warned me that you had cloven feet, horns on your head, a tail, and a smell of sulphurous brimstone about you. Thanks to your co-operation with me, people are talking up and down the street about my detective ability.”

“That’s fine,” Mason said. “If a few more of them would cooperate with me we might get along a lot better. Tell us about Dr. Renault.”

“Dr. Renault made a complete statement,” Vandling said. “He was given no promises of immunity or otherwise. After thinking things over he decided he had better clear his conscience as best he could.

“There seems to be no doubt about what happened. You called the turn. Davenport had poisoned Hortense Paxton so his wife would get the Delano money. Then he started turning everything he could get hold of into cash, juggling funds and leaving accounts in a mess. Also he started laying the foundations for his wife’s conviction of Hortense Paxton’s death if there should be any investigation.”

Mason nodded.

“Davenport knew that he might come under suspicion unless he could divert suspicion to someone else,” Vandling went on. “So he was very careful to tell his wife, in the presence of Sara Ansel, that he had left a letter with his secretary which was to be delivered to the police in the event of his death, that in that letter he accused her of poisoning Hortense Paxton and of poisoning him because he had become suspicious.

“Apparently that envelope never did contain anything except sheets of blank paper, but he felt certain that his wife, under the aggressive guidance of Sara Ansel, would take steps to see that this envelope was removed if Ed Davenport should die under circumstances that suggested poisoning.

“By planting the impression in the mind of his secretary that his wife really intended to poison him and had poisoned Hortense Paxton, Davenport had the stage all set. He filled two suitcases with cash and started for Fresno in order to arrange his ‘death.’

“He had previously made arrangements with Dr. Renault, a physician with a shady reputation, to see that the circumstances of his death were duly carried out in such a way that it would appear he had been poisoned and then someone had whisked his corpse away so that no autopsy could be performed on it.

“Davenport told Dr. Renault it would arouse suspicions if any of his things were missing, so he had purchased a little traveling bag into which he had transferred his toilet articles and the telltale box of candy he had been so careful to obtain—candy which he knew his wife had touched.

“So Dr. Renault with a hypodermic syringe injected poison into every piece of candy, then sealed the holes with a hot needle. Davenport instructed him to use both arsenic and cyanide because he knew the authorities could prove his wife had both poisons.

“Davenport locked his two suitcases full of money in the trunk of the getaway car, and Dr. Renault gave him a physic and an emetic in order to simulate the symptoms of collapse and arsenic poisoning.

“Davenport had arranged things so that he could slip out through the window of the cabin, get in the car which had been left there and drive out two or three miles to a place where a house trailer had been placed all in readiness for his arrival.

“Naturally Davenport wanted to get all of the money out of the Paradise account. There were some remittances which he expected to arrive on Friday, or by Saturday at the latest. They didn’t come in and he knew they wouldn’t be in until Monday. In the meantime everything had been arranged for his synthetic death to take place on Monday afternoon.

“Davenport had a tip that they were going to exhume Hortense Paxton’s body and he knew that he couldn’t wait. Therefore the thing to do was to work out some scheme by which he could loot the Paradise account after his supposed death.

“Mabel Norge was a credulous young woman who had extreme loyalty to him and he had gradually been building up in her mind the idea that his wife had tried to poison him.

“So Davenport told Mabel Norge that he was going home, that he didn’t know at what time his wife might try to poison him. He made her promise that she would withdraw every cent from the Paradise bank and that no matter what happened she would take it to San Bernardino, that she was to meet someone at San Bernardino who was working on a mining deal with Davenport. That person was to have a password that would enable her to identify him and then she would turn over the money.

“This man was Beckemeyer, the third party to the conspiracy. Beckemeyer and Davenport had pulled several sharp deals together. Davenport had used Beckemeyer as the dummy through whom he had siphoned cash out of the various accounts.

“When Davenport suggested he might be getting into a jam which would force him to skip the country, Beckemeyer mentioned that he had a doctor in Crampton who would do anything for cash and who was very hard up.

“So Beckemeyer introduced Davenport to Dr. Renault and the scheme was hatched by which Ed Davenport was apparently to die under such circumstances he would be considered a victim rather than a suspect.

“Dr. Renault got five thousand in cash. He says he has no idea what Beckemeyer was to get, probably a lot more than that.

“Beckemeyer was to drive the house trailer to Nevada while Ed Davenport lay safely in bed in the trailer. In that way even if anyone saw Davenport getting out of the window and started a search, Davenport would be out of sight.

“Beckemeyer was also to provide the getaway car and attend to the details. Dr. Renault was simply to bring about Davenport’s simulated death.

“Mabel Norge had been instructed to go to the office in Paradise Monday evening. She was to receive a telephone message as to where to go in San Bernardino, taking the money with her. All she knew was that she might be juggling funds so that Mrs. Davenport couldn’t get wind of a deal Davenport was making.

“Now, according to Dr. Renault’s story, Beckemeyer must have done some fast thinking. He knew that Davenport was going to have more than two hundred thousand dollars in cash.

“So Beckemeyer conceived a brilliant idea. Why not see that Davenport really disappeared. Since this was what Davenport was intending to do, Dr. Renault wouldn’t suspect anything because he knew that was exactly the deal Renault was to help engineer.

“The idea, of course, was that it would appear Myrna Davenport had poisoned her husband, that she had first given him poison in the candy, that then she had finished the job when she was left alone with her husband who was then supposed to be in a dying condition. Naturally the conspirators wouldn’t have any corpse, so they had to have it appear that Myrna had some male accomplice who had whisked the body out of the window so it couldn’t be autopsied.

“Beckemeyer studied the full possibilities of this situation. Sometime before Friday he went out to a place near where the house trailer had been planted and dug a convenient grave. When Davenport, in pursuance of the conspiracy, slipped out to the trailer, Beckemeyer gave him a few drinks and cooked him a meal of bacon and eggs. Dr. Renault said he warned Davenport to get some food in his stomach the very first thing, otherwise he might really collapse.

“Davenport ate the bacon and eggs and then he and Beckemeyer had a few more drinks, toasting the success of the conspiracy. Beckemeyer slipped a slug of cyanide of potassium in Davenport’s whisky. Davenport died almost instantly. Beckemeyer took him out and planted him in the grave, then drove away with the house trailer.

“But Beckemeyer knew there was about thirty thousand dollars in the Paradise account that was to be reduced to cash. He had been instructed to give Mabel Norge the message as to where to take this money in San Bernardino. It was planned that Beckemeyer would call the Paradise number, phone just the address and hang up fast before the call could be traced in case of any hitch in the Paradise scheme.

“Beckemeyer was smart. After he got crossed up on the delivery of the money in San Bernardino he realized that he might have put himself in a vulnerable position, that he might have been talking with someone other than Mabel Norge when he called the Paradise number. So he immediately adopted the position that Davenport had retained him as a private detective to go to San Bernardino and watch the motel unit in question and wrote you a letter that would account for his trip to San Bernardino.

“Now that’s generally Dr. Renault’s story. It’s probably true. Beckemeyer, however, will probably try to blame the murder on Dr. Renault. By the time we get done we’ll have each of them singing like canaries.”

“Why was Dr. Renault so stubborn about that cyanide?” Mason asked.

“Dr. Renault said he knew what must have happened just as soon as he learned about the cyanide at the autopsy. He was preparing his own defense even then. If he had ever admitted that there had been even a single symptom of cyanide poisoning while he was treating Ed Davenport, he would have crucified himself in case the true story ever came out.

“If it hadn’t been for the children finding that grave, we would never have known what happened. A convincing case of poisoning would have been made out against Myrna Davenport. She probably would have been convicted.”

Mason chuckled. “You can imagine how Dr. Renault felt when the body was found and the autopsy showed poisoning by cyanide.”

“Well,” Vandling said, “thanks to your co-operation I’ve had a nice feather in my cap. People here are patting me on the back and they’re going to keep patting me on the back. The thing that I can’t understand is how the devil you figured it out.”

“I didn’t figure it all out,” Mason said, “but I knew that Edward Davenport was the only person who could have been sure he would be taken sick at Crampton. If Davenport had planned it that way, then it was almost certain that Dr. Renault was in on it. And because the grave had been dug it was almost certain that someone else knew it had been planned in advance that Davenport was to be taken ill at Crampton.

“When you come right down to it, Vandling, you have to bear in mind that while Beckemeyer and Renault may have committed the actual murder the one who really put his neck in the noose was Ed Davenport.”

“Contributory negligence,” Vandling said, grinning.

“Exactly,” Mason observed, filling the glasses once more. “Well,” he said, “here’s to crime.”

The End