The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom
- Автор: Гарднер Эрл Стенли
- Серия: Perry Mason #35
- Год: 1949
- Язык: английский
- Год: William Morrow
- Жанр: Классические детективы
Электронная книга - «The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom». Краткое содержание книги:
“What are you going to do, Perry?”
Mason said, “I’m going to take my convertible, drive it down to Oceanside, park it in just about the position the witness says that other car was parked. You and Della are going to get Mr. Mortimer C. Irving, tell him you want him to take a look at a car, and drive him down the highway. My convertible will be parked there and I’ll bet you ten to one the guy identifies my convertible as the one he saw — if he sees it before he sees Garvin’s car.”
“And then what?” Drake asked, dubiously.
“And then,” Mason said, “we’re going to come back home and Mrs. Lorraine Garvin is going to tell the police they can ‘borrow’ her car to look it over. The police will rush the car up to Oceanside and ask Irving to identify it. Irving will then tell them that isn’t the car, that he’s already identified the car, that it’s a car with a certain license number.”
“He won’t identify it if he thinks it belongs to you and knows who you are,” Drake said.
“He won’t know who I am,” Mason told him, “and he won’t know whom the car belongs to.”
Drake shook his head and said, “In the words of a man who has a lot more sense than I have in such matters ‘include me out.’ ”
“Why?”
“It’s too damned dangerous. You can get into trouble over that.”
“What sort of trouble?” Mason asked. “All we’re doing is asking a man to identify a car.”
“And pulling a razzle-dazzle on him. You’re making him think it was the same car he saw there shortly after midnight and...”
“And that’s exactly what the police arc going to be doing,” Mason said. “The police adopt the position that it’s all right when they do it, but illegal when someone else does it. The hell with that stuff! Arc you coming or not?”
“Not,” Drake said positively. “I have a license to consider. That’s getting too close to...”
Mason glanced over at Della Street.
She pushed her chair back, started for the hat closet and said, “My car’s in the parking lot, chief. It’s all filled. I can’t make quite as good time with it as you can with that big convertible of yours, but I’ll be right on your heels if you keep anywhere near the speed limit.”
Mason grabbed his hat, “Let’s go,” he said.
Drake said, “There’ll be a hell of a squawk over that, Perry. They’ll...”
“Let them squawk,” Mason said. “I’m not going to sit tight and let them put ideas in the mind of that witness. I’m not going to let them hypnotize my client into a murder rap. If I have a right to cross-examine a man and ask him how he knows that’s the car, after he’s given his testimony in court, I have a right to cross-examine him before he testifies and demonstrate to him that he can’t really tell one convertible from another. Come on, Della.”
Fourteen
Perry Mason and Della Street stopped in front of the unpretentious little house on a side street in Oceanside.
Mason, leaving Della Street at the wheel, left her car, climbed the steps and knocked on the door.
A redheaded woman with a truculent manner jerked open the door. Deep-set blue eyes sized Mason up from a toil-worn face. She said, “We don’t want anything,” and started to slam the door.
“Just a minute,” Mason said, laughing, “I want to see your husband.”
“He’s working.”
“Can you tell me where?”
“At the Standard Service Station.”
“He’s told you about the automobile he saw when he was driving back from La Jolla?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I want to talk with him about it,” Mason told her. “Did he describe it to you?”
“All he could see was that it was a sort of a light-colored convertible. There was no one in it. It wasn’t the car that woman was driving when she was killed.”
“You know what time he got home?”
“I’ll say I know what time he got home,” she said. “Ten minutes to one. Sitting down there with those fellows swapping yarns and gambling money that he hasn’t any right to risk! He’s a lousy poker player, always trying to bluff when he doesn’t have a good hand — coming back with a lot of stories and...”
“We’ll find him at the filling station?”
“That’s right.”
Mason thanked her, walked rapidly back to the automobile, and had Della Street drive him to the filling station where he inquired for Mortimer Irving.
Irving, a tall, slow-moving, genial individual with twinkling eyes who managed somehow to look a lot younger than his wife, grinned at them and said, “Yeah. I saw this car down there — didn’t think anything of it at the time but — well, you know, I saw the lights on and — oh, I don’t know, I just sort of wondered. I thought maybe some girl was having a little difficulty and had switched on the lights hoping it would attract attention and — shucks, I don’t know, I just turned my spotlight on it.”
Mason said, “Could you get away from here for about half an hour?”
“Nope.”
“If I gave you ten dollars?” Mason asked.
The man hesitated.
“And another ten that you could slip to your buddy who’s on duty to take care of all the customers who came in while you were gone?”
Irving tilted back his hat and scratched his head, thinking the matter over. “How much did you lose at the poker game?” Mason asked, his voice friendly.
“A little over fifteen bucks.”
“Why didn’t you say so in the first place?” Mason asked. “I’ll give you twenty dollars, another ten for the man who’s on duty with you, and another five for the boy who’s running the washrack to come over and help out in case cars get jammed up here. Then you can go ahead and tell your wife that you really made a profit on the trip to La Jolla, after all. You lost fifteen or sixteen bucks and got twenty back.”
Irving said, “You sure do know how to sell a bill of goods, mister. If I could talk like that I’d be the top salesman for the whole United States. Just a second and I’ll go talk to the boys.”
“Here’s the thirty-five dollars,” Mason said, counting out a twenty, a ten and a five. “You won’t be gone more than a few minutes.”
Irving went over and talked with his assistant, then with the man at the greaserack. He came back with a grin, opened the rear door of the car, climbed in and said, “Now this is really going to be fun. I’ll enjoy going home tonight and meeting the wife. I was thinking I’d rather take a beating than to go back and hear about that money I lost in the poker game. Now I’m going to enjoy it.”
Mason nodded to Della Street who drove the car rapidly down the highway.
“You think you’d know this convertible if you saw it again?” Mason asked.
“Well, to tell you the truth, I didn’t take a look at it so much to see what make and year and model and all that stuff it was. I just looked it over the way a person would to see if people were in it. I was a little worried about — oh, I don’t know, I was thinking that some girl had maybe got out with a wolf who was getting a little too rough or something, and... shucks, I don’t know, I just saw the lights and I stopped and turned my spotlight on the car, that’s all. At night that way when you turn a spotlight on an automobile, the light brings the car out sharply against a dark background, but there aren’t any shadows or anything. It’s what you’d call a flat picture if you were talking about it in terms of photography.”
“I see you play around with a camera,” Mason said.
“I do when I can get enough money to buy film. I get a great kick out of it.”
“Well,” Mason said, “we’ll see if we can’t get you some film. What size does your camera take?”