“But what will we do if you find it?” Barney Quinn asked.
“We’ll keep it,” I said.
“It will be evidence,” Quinn pointed out. “It’s a crime to conceal evidence. It’s unprofessional conduct. They could disbar me for that.”
I grinned at him. “You won’t be there, Barney. Tomorrow be sure to ask me if we found a gun in the hedge. Come on, Bertha, let’s go. We’ll see you at your place in a couple of hours, Mrs. Endicott. Leave the back door open for us. You can fortify us with coffee and assure us the coast is clear.”
Chapter 17
It was a dark night. High fog was drifting in from the ocean and there was a lot of humidity in the air.
Bertha Cool and I were down on our hands and knees on the damp grass, crawling along the hedge, our fingers digging through every inch of the soil.
“Why did you tell Betty Endicott to stay inside?” she asked.
“For one reason, we can’t trust her,” I said. “For another reason, in case anybody comes she can give us a signal.”
“I’ve ruined a dress, a pair of nylons and broken two fingernails,” Bertha Cool said.
“That’s nothing,” I said. “You may be ruining your professional career.”
“Why the hell do we do this?”
“It’s a service we give our clients.”
“I never did anything like this before you came along,” Bertha said. “It wasn’t until you teamed up with me that we started getting into all these damn scrapes.”
“You never made money before,” I told her. “Shut up and get busy. Don’t just skim along the surface. Work your fingers down deep into the soil. The thing has been out here for years, and it’ll be pretty well covered.”
“How come no one’s found it?” she asked.
“No one’s looked. The gardener puts water on the hedge. He trims it once in a while. The hedge is so thick it keeps weeds from growing underneath and he’s never spaded it up to do a decent job of it. He’s cut sod around the edges and thrown dirt into the center. He’s probably covered the thing up years ago.”
Bertha ripped out a string of cuss words.
“What’s the matter?”
“I’ve torn my dress and scratched my face. Donald, why the hell can’t we have a flashlight on this job?”
“We can’t let anyone know what’s going on. The police may be keeping the place under surveillance. Hale lives next door.”
Bertha grunted, groaned, heaved around on her hands and knees. She cussed me up one side and down the other, and then my fingers struck something.
“Wait a minute, Bertha!” I said. “I think... it’s either a stone or... okay, this is it. It’s the gun!”
“Well, thank God,” Bertha said. “It’s about time!” She heaved herself to her feet. “I don’t know how the hell I’m going to get into my apartment house. If the doorman gets a look at me, he’ll think I’ve been stealing chickens.”
“Tell him he’s underestimating you,” I told her. “Tell him you’ve been compounding a felony. Stealing chickens is a misdemeanor.”
“Well,” Bertha said, “let’s go tell Elizabeth Endicott, and I suppose we should telephone Barney Quinn.”
“No,” I said.
“No what?”
“We’ll tell Elizabeth Endicott we searched the whole damn hedge and couldn’t find anything,” I told her. “We tell Barney Quinn the same thing.”
“Sometimes,” Bertha said with feeling, “I wish to hell I’d never seen you.”
Chapter 18
There was one thing wrong with the story John Dittmar Ansel had told Barney Quinn.
The gun was pretty badly rusted. I couldn’t even break the cylinder open without subjecting the gun to a lot of treatment designed to remove rust. But by using my flashlight after I’d cleaned out some of the dirt from the barrel, I could see, despite the rust, that the shell in line with the barrel had been fired. The beam of the flashlight very plainly showed the empty cartridge case. The other five cartridges had bullets in them.
It was one hell of a mess.
The case started on schedule. We droned through getting the jury empaneled.
Barney Quinn had our notes. He had us sitting in court where we could be consulted, but the guy had lost heart. He was like a man being dragged into the execution chamber. He carefully refrained from asking us anything about the gun.
During the noon recess, I took him off to one side where there were no reporters around and handed it to him straight from the shoulder.
“This is the kind of stuff that separates the men from the boys,” I told him. “You’re in this case as an attorney representing a defendant who is charged with murder. The punishment for murder is death. The jurors are watching the district attorney and the jurors are watching you. You look like a man who’s defending a guilty client. That’s not fair to you and it’s not fair to your client. Get the hell in there and fight. Don’t fight as though you had your back to the wall, but fight with the smiling confidence of a man who is representing an innocent defendant.”
“I’m not that good an actor,” Quinn said.
“You’d better start learning then,” I told him.
He did a little better in the afternoon.
Using the information we had dug up for him, Quinn knew everything there was to know about the jurors. The danger, of course, lay in the fact that the panel would be exhausted. Then the judge would have to order a special venire, and Quinn would have a list of names about which he knew nothing.
Mortimer Irvine, the district attorney, was a tall, good-looking, dignified man with wavy dark hair, broad shoulders, slim waist and an air of distinction.
Irvine was unmarried, considered one of the most eligible bachelors in the country, and he loved to get impressionable young women on a jury. He’d also go for the older, white-haired, matronly type. He didn’t like the horny-handed ranchers.
The impressionable young women looked on him as they’d look on a matinee idol. They’d listen to his arguments and bring in a verdict of conviction, walk out of a courtroom and say to each other, “Wasn’t he just wonderful!”
The older women said Irvine reminded them of what “Jimmy” would have been like if “Jimmy” had only lived. “Jimmy” had always wanted to be a lawyer.
Some of the horny-handed old ranchers would look at Irvine’s carefully combed hair, gaze into his soulful eyes, and return a verdict for the defendant.
Barney Quinn had made up his jury list with the idea of keeping as many of the young women as possible off the jury. Irvine had made up his jury list with the idea of getting an all-woman jury if possible.
After I saw the way things were going, I got Barney to one side.
“Play into his hands, Barney.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let him get women on the jury.”
“Gosh, no!” Quinn protested. “He’s got too many of them on there now. Women go for him. He has a rich resonant voice. He looks soulfully into the eyes of each woman on the jury as he argues. He pays three hundred dollars for his suits, and he puts on a freshly pressed suit every morning. The guy’s got enough property so he isn’t dependent on his law practice. He wants adulation and influence. He’s got his eye on being a state senator, attorney general and governor.”
“Nevertheless,” I said, “play into his hand. Let him get women on the jury.”