The Case of the Sleepwalker's Niece

Chapter 22

Mason, entering his office, scaled his hat at a marble bust of Blackstone. The hat struck squarely, spun half around, and slid over on the statue’s head at a rakish angle. Della Street tried to be casual, but her eyes were starry. “Over the goal line, eh, Chief?”

“Right between the goal posts.”

“When did you get wise?” she asked.

“Darned if I know,” he told her, sitting on the edge of the desk and grinning boyishly. “Little facts kept pricking away at my consciousness. Why the devil should Edna Hammer have been reading up on sleepwalking? Why should she have put a lock on her door? Why did the figure that Duncan saw walk across the patio stop at the little coffee table; and why did the knife that was locked in the sideboard drawer disappear? Why did Maddox call Mrs. Kent at three o’clock in the morning, when he knew that a conference had already been arranged? I discounted most of Duncan ’s testimony because I figured he was just one of those egotistical ducks who would commit unconscious perjury. Give him a button and he’d sew a vest on it. But he’d undoubtedly seen someone walking around in a nightgown. When he said he put on his glasses he was a damn liar. He hadn’t. All he’d seen was a whiterobed figure walking around in the moonlight. When he surmised, from subsequent events, that this figure must have been Kent, he hypnotized himself into believing he’d recognized Kent. He was sufficiently partisan to make himself more and more positive. But that didn’t clear up the mysterious telephone conversation. Maddox was shrewd enough to avoid committing himself on the telephone call which Duncan put in around eleven o’clock in the evening to Mrs. Kent. His answers on direct examination didn’t give me any inkling that he’d been present. I intended, of course, to crossexamine Duncan about any prior telephone calls, because Mrs. Kent ’s statement over the telephone that a conference had already been arranged through Maddox’s lawyer indicated Duncan had been in touch with her. But Maddox did definitely state he hadn’t telephoned Mrs. Kent at three o’clock in the morning. I didn’t figure he’d perjure himself about something which could be checked up on. That made me start concentrating on Harris, and the minute I did that, I realized I was on the right trail. Harris was the one who had upset the apple cart all the way along the line. He’d been trying to get Kent convicted. When he realized Kent might have a good sleepwalking defense, he tried to blow it up by stating that the knife wasn’t in the drawer when Edna locked it. He allowed himself to be subpoenaed as a witness. He’d evidently telephoned in an anonymous tip or two to the district attorney’s office. Someone tipped Holcomb off that I’d been getting a duplicate knife to introduce to the case. When I asked Edna, she said she hadn’t told anyone; but later on she must have told Harris.”

“You weren’t really trying to mix the knives up, were you, Chief?”

“Of course not. All I was trying to do was to impress on Edna’s mind the importance of that knife in the sideboard drawer, so that she’d go to sleep with that thought uppermost in her mind.”

“And then you figured she’d walk in her sleep again?”

“Yes.”

“And take the knife?”

“Yes.”

“And what did you think she’d do with it?”

“If my reasoning was right, she’d do the same thing she did before, of course—put it under the top of the coffee table. It was her little private hiding place for things she didn’t want discovered.”

“And Harris knew that?”

“Of course he knew it. He’d been surreptitiously living with her as her husband for over a month. He had a key to the house and a key to the new lock Edna had installed on her bedroom door. Moreover, the clews which pointed to him fairly screamed for attention. He’d been watching the house in Santa Barbara. If he’d been where he said he was, he’d have seen Mrs. Kent leave the house, get out her car and start for Los Angeles. He didn’t see it. Therefore, he wasn’t there. But, if he wasn’t there, where was he? He could give the exact time of the telephone call which Mrs. Kent received at three o’clock in the morning. He could tell what she said over the wire. How could he have done that if he hadn’t been there? There was only one other explanation: He’d been the one who had put in the telephone call. As soon as I considered that possibility, I realized that it was the only explanation. It had been right there in the open all through the case, clamoring for attention, and we simply hadn’t thought of it. Harris, ostensibly, was watching the house in Santa Barbara to see that Mrs. Kent didn’t leave. He wanted to rush back to Los Angeles, commit a murder, and then return to Santa Barbara. He realized that if Mrs. Kent left the house in the meantime, it would be highly advisable for him to know that fact. Therefore, he decided to call her on the long distance telephone. Naturally, he couldn’t use his own name. Looking around for a plausible name to use, he picked on Maddox, because he figured it was a logical development for Maddox to try to get together with Mrs. Kent; the trouble was it was too logical; too well thought out. Through Duncan, Maddox had already telephoned to Mrs. Kent. By that telephone conversation, Harris accomplished two results which were very valuable to him. First, he made certain that Mrs. Kent was at her residence at three o’clock in the morning; second, he took notes of everything that she said so he could repeat the conversation and thereby make it seem he was there in Santa Barbara within a few minutes of the time the murder was committed.”

“But why did he want to murder Rease?”

“He had two reasons. Rease was the only other heir to Kent’s fortune, aside from Edna Hammer, who had recently become Harris’s legal wife. By murdering Rease, he got one heir out of the way and then, by pinning the crime on Kent, he was going to have the hangman get Kent out of the way.”

“But Kent had made a will disinheriting Edna.”

“No, he hadn’t. He was going to make such a will after Harris married Edna. That was why Harris arranged to have the ceremony a secret one. He thought he’d have a chance to get Kent out of the way before Kent learned of the marriage and changed his will.”

“But Harris himself was the one who asked Kent to change the will.”

Mason laughed and said, “That was a mighty ingenious touch. Harris is an adventurer, an exploiter and an opportunist. He realized that Edna Hammer was a mighty attractive young woman who was going to inherit a considerable fortune. He also had looked up the situation enough to know that Kent was kicking out every suitor who might be a fortune hunter. So Harris beat Kent to it by asking him to disinherit Edna after he married her. He was playing the same game Pritchard was. He’d picked up a little stake from somewhere and was using it to give himself a swell front, hoping he’d be able to marry a wealthy woman.”

“But what if Kent had taken him at his word and had already changed the will?”

“No,” Mason said, “ Kent was too much of a business man to do anything like that. He wanted to be certain Edna was happily married before he made a new will. Looking back on it, I don’t think Harris planned murder from the start. You see, he was just a sheik with enough money to put up a good front, and an ambition to marry into some real coin. He started, I think, as an opportunist, just one step at a time. First he wanted to get legally married to Edna. Then he saw such a splendid opportunity to get both Rease and Kent out of the way that he couldn’t resist it. Edna had told him about Peter’s previous history of sleepwalking, then, when Harris realized that his wife was walking in her sleep, taking the carving knife from the sideboard and hiding it, then going back to bed and going to sleep, Harris conceived the idea of capitalizing upon Kent’s sleepwalking propensities. Therefore, on the night of the twelfth, after Edna had pulled her sleepwalking stuff and gone back to a sound slumber, Harris took the knife from where she had secreted it, slipped quietly into Kent’s bedroom, after first unlocking the door with the key he had taken from Edna’s purse, and planted the knife under Kent’s pillow. Kent found it in the morning and was paralyzed with fright. Edna also found it. Both of them jumped at the conclusion Kent was walking in his sleep again. Edna knew she was a sleepwalker, but didn’t know she had been getting the knife from the sideboard. Therefore, she didn’t suspect herself. Harris had everything planned for a murder. I don’t know how he’d planned it, but when the Santa Barbara business came up he changed his plans so as to take advantage of it. Harris had set the stage. All he needed was to find a good alibi. I unwittingly played into his hands by giving him the chance to go to Santa Barbara, return to Hollywood, and slip into Kent’s residence. He had the key which Edna had given him. He only needed to go to the coffee table in the patio and raise the lid. If the knife hadn’t been there, he might have had some other scheme of murder. I don’t know. But the knife was there. All he had to do was take it, kill Rease, go to Kent’s bedroom—by this time he’d had a duplicate key made to Kent’s door—slip the knife under Kent’s pillow and start back for Santa Barbara.”

“Then it couldn’t have been three o’clock in the morning when Duncan saw the sleepwalker?” Della asked.

“Certainly not. It was quarter past twelve. That was where coincidence happened to play right into Harris’s hands.

“He skipped out?” she asked.

“Sure. As soon as he heard me say that Mrs. Doris Sully Kent was in the courtroom and we’d reached a compromise, he knew that she’d testify about that telephone conversation, and tell me frankly about the conference with Maddox and Duncan. Harris realized early in the game that the fact she had left for Los Angeles right after that telephone conversation was a circumstance which was going to put him on the spot, if anyone happened to appreciate the full significance of what must have happened. And Duncan’s testimony about Maddox and he being together when they called Mrs. Kent at eleven o’clock damned Harris.”

“And Maddox skipped out, too?”

“Yes. He was mixed up in that fraud so that his only hope of coming out on top of the heap was to get a good settlement from Kent. With Kent in jail, he hoped to deal with Mrs. Kent. When he saw that door was closed, he skipped. He wasn’t running away from a murder charge, he was running away from a fraud charge.”

“But would there have been a case against Mr. Kent if Rease hadn’t changed bedrooms with Maddox?”

“Trace that back,” Mason said, “and you’ll find the suggestion came from Harris. Rease was a hypochondriac, and all Harris needed to do was to suggest he should change bedrooms in order to avoid a draft, and the thing was as good as done. Remember that Harris was the fairhaired boychild around that house. Likable, magnetic and all of that, he enjoyed the confidence of everyone.”

“Was the district attorney flabbergasted?” she asked.

“So damned flabbergasted he listened to me explaining the clews in the case to him in the Judge’s chambers and stuck his cigar back in his mouth wrong end to, and burnt his mouth out of shape,” Mason said, chuckling delightedly as he recalled the spectacle.

The End