Hale said, “You see how it is. The upper drawer was made very deep so it would hold the desk blotter. The lower drawers aren’t as deep by some eight inches. There was that much dead space in the desk.”
I was curious now. “Not one chance in a hundred any of those papers concern the girl we want, but seeing we’ve gone this far, we may as well get them out.”
“How?”
“We’ll take everything out of the desk and stand the thing on its head.”
Hale didn’t say a word, started pulling the drawers out, and then removing things from the pigeonholes in the top of the desk, a bottle of ink, some pens, blotter, a couple of boxes of matches, and a few minor odds and ends which had accumulated as a hold-over from past tenants.
“Ready?” he demanded. I nodded.
We each took hold of an end of the desk and moved it out from the wall.
Hale said, “I may as well confess to you. Lam, that I’m something of a detective myself. I’m interested in human nature, and nothing gives me quite as much pleasure as to be able to pry into the unexpected corners of the human mind. I like to read old correspondence. Came on a trunk full of letters at one time in connection with cleaning up an estate. Most interesting thing I’ve ever seen. Now, just tilt it down on that side. There we are. Easy now. Well, this trunk full of letters belonged to a woman who died at the age of seventy-eight. She’d saved every letter she’d ever received. Letters in there she’d received during her childhood, letters during the time she was being courted. Most interesting collection I’ve ever seen. And they weren’t the repressed sort of letters that you’d expect either. Some of them were dynamite. Now, let’s turn the thing right on over. Say, there’s something heavy in there.”
There was indeed something heavy in the desk. It slid down the back of the desk, hit against the inverted top with a thud, and then lodged there. We’d have to find some other way.
“Pick the desk up and shake it,” I said. “Hold it down this way.”
The desk was heavy. It took us a minute to get it elevated at just the right angle. When we had it sloped right, the heavy object thudded out to the floor. After that, I could hear the rustle of papers sliding out and dropping to the carpet. We couldn’t see what they were while we were holding the desk.
“Give it a shake,” I suggested.
We shook the desk. Hale took his big palm and pounded on the back. “I guess that’s all.”
We righted the desk and looked down at the pile of stuff on the floor. There were old letters, yellowed newspaper clippings, and the heavy object.
Hale and I stood staring at that heavy object.
It was a .38 caliber revolver.
I picked it up and looked at it. Four chambers of the cylinder were loaded. Two of them held exploded cartridges. There were some spots of rust on the gun, but, for the most part, it was in good condition.
Hale said, “Someone must have put that gun in the desk drawer on top of some papers, then as he opened the drawer hurriedly the gun dropped down behind, and—”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Let’s take a look at the way that drawer fits.”
I fitted the drawer into the groove and looked at the space behind it.
“No dice,” I told him. “That gun couldn’t have dropped down behind there accidentally. The space is too small. That gun must have been deliberately dropped down there after someone had taken the drawer out. In other words, that was used, not as a place of storage but as a place of concealment.”
Hale got down on his knees and struck two matches to verify my conclusions; then he said, “You’re right, Lam! You really are a detective! Let’s see what the letters have to say.”
We picked up some of the old letters. They didn’t mean much: some old receipted bills; a pleading, desperate letter from some woman who wanted a man to return and marry her; another letter from some man who wanted to borrow money to tide him him over an emergency and written in the “dear-old-pal” vein.
Hale chuckled. “I like these things,” he said as he finished reading the letter. “Little cross-sections of life. Being perfect strangers to the transaction, we can examine the tone of that letter and see how badly that ‘dear-old-pal’ stuff is overdone. I wouldn’t trust that man as far as I could throw this desk with one hand.”
“Neither would I,” I told him. “I wonder what the newspaper clippings are.”
He pushed those to one side. “Those are meaningless. It’s the letters that count. Here’s one in feminine handwriting. Perhaps it’s another letter from the girl who wanted the man to marry her. I wonder how that came out.”
I picked up the old newspaper clippings, ran idly through them, said suddenly, “Wait a minute, Hale. We’ve struck something here.”
“What?”
“Pay dirt.”
“What do you mean?”
I said, “It may tie up with this thirty-eight caliber revolver.”
Hale dropped the letter he was reading, said excitedly, “How’s that?”
“These clippings have to do with the murder of a man by the name of Craig. Howard Chandler Craig. Twenty-nine years old, unmarried, employed as a book-keeper by the Roxberry Estates. Let’s see. Where was the murder committed? Wait a minute. Here’s a heading. Los Angeles Times, June 11, 1937.”
Hale said, “Now wouldn’t that be something? Suppose the murderer escaped and came here—” He picked up one of the clippings, started reading through it. It had been folded over a couple of times, and he unfolded it and looked at the photograph just about the time I was reading the details of the account.
When I heard Hale’s quick intake of breath, I knew what caused it.
“Lam!” he said excitedly. “Look here!”
I said, “I’m reading about it in this one.”
“But here’s her photograph.”
I looked at the coarse-meshed reproduction of Roberta Fenn’s picture. Underneath it were the words Roberta Fenn, twenty-one-year-old stenographer, was riding with Howard Craig when holdup occurred.
Hale said excitedly, “Lam, do you know what this means?”
I said; “No.”
He said, “I do.”
“Don’t be too sure you do. I don’t.”
“But it’s as plain as the nose on your face.”
I said, “Let’s study these clippings before we go jumping to any hasty conclusions.”
We read through all of the clippings, exchanging them with each other. Hale finished reading first.
“Well?” he asked when I’d finished.
I said, “Not necessarily.”
“Bosh!” Hale said. “You can see it all as plain as day. She went out with this bookkeeper — probably another case of a girl wanting a man to marry her, and he refused. She got out of the car on some excuse or another, walked around to the driver’s side, shot Craig twice through the left temple, hid the gun, and came in with this story of the masked bandit who had stepped out of the bush and ordered Craig to throw up his hands. He’d done it. The man had gone through his pockets, and then had ordered Roberta Fenn to walk down the road with him.
“That was more than Craig would stand tor. He started the motor in his car, threw it into gear, and tried to run the man down, but the chap just managed to get to one side. He shot Craig twice in the head as the momentum of the car carried Craig up even with him.
“No one ever questioned the girl’s story. Craig was considered a gentleman and a martyr. One reason police didn’t question Roberta’s story was that there had been two dozen petting-party holdups in the neighborhood within a period of a few months. On several occasions where the girl had been unusually attractive, the bandit had ordered her to walk down the road with him. There had been two other murders—”