“Oh, I see. They furnish Oriental rugs, antique desks, and...”
“All right. If you have to know, I’ll tell you about those. I saw you stretching your neck when you came in here this morning. Ross Hollister likes the good things of life. He intends to keep his place in Santa del Barra after we’re married, but he wants to keep this place up too. He’s an expert on furniture and interior decorating, and gradually he’s bringing down bits of furniture he can spare from his place in Santa del Barra.
“That rug, for instance, came in Sunday. And his snooty old housekeeper had to wire me yesterday morning asking if he’d given me an Oriental rug. As though it’s any of her business! She comes in by the day and goes home at four-thirty. Ross takes his dinners out, but he pays her just as much as if she were there all the time. I can tell you one thing, when we’re married that woman is going to go — fast!”
“Why did she wire you? Why not ask him?”
“Because he left Santa del Barra at six o’clock Monday to secretly lease some lands on which he has a very confidential report from a geologist He’s a whiz at...”
“All right,” Mason interrupted. “We’ll hear more about him later. Right now go get some clothes on. You’re going places.”
Chapter 9
Mason held the door open for her and they walked down the steps together.
“I wish you’d tell me where we’re—” She stopped abruptly.
“What’s the matter?” Mason asked.
“That’s my car!” she exclaimed.
“Where?”
“That sedan over there.”
“You’re certain?”
“Of course I’m not absolutely certain. It looks like my car.”
“Just which one is it?”
“Right across the street, the one parked down next to the alley. The light brown sedan with the red wheels and the white side-walls.”
“All right,” Mason said, “let’s go take a look and see if it’s yours.”
They crossed the street. Lucille walked around to the left-hand side of the car, opened the door, and said, “Good heavens, yes! This is my car and my keys are in it.”
“Don’t you usually leave your keys in it?”
“In the garage, yes. I leave the garage door locked and my keys are in it then, but whenever it’s parked on the street I always take the keys out.”
“Didn’t you use the car today?”
“No.”
“How did you get to my office?”
“In Arthur’s car.”
“All right, what do you want to do with your car — take the keys out and leave it here, or...?”
“I want to drive it right back into the garage where it belongs.”
She climbed in behind the steering wheel, angrily twisted the ignition keys, and jabbed her foot on the starter.
The starter whirred, the motor caught, raced for a moment, backfired, sputtered, raced and backfired again.
“Perhaps you have your choke too far out,” Mason said.
“The choke isn’t out,” she said.
“I’ll walk around to the garage,” Mason told her, “and open the doors. That motor certainly doesn’t sound right.”
“Well, it doesn’t feel right. I don’t know whether someone’s playing a joke on me or what, but — Arthur’s a good mechanic. He was supposed to put new wiring on the car and — I don’t know what he did. It was running all right, only the wiring was a little worn.”
“It’s probably connected wrong,” Mason said. “You can drive across through the alley and up to your garage. I’ll walk over and open the door. I guess you can get the car that far. Then we’ll look under the hood and see what’s wrong.”
He walked across the street and up the alley.
Behind him, he could hear the car sputtering, banging and backfiring as Lucille Barton nursed it across the street. Then the shaft of her headlights illuminated the garage doors. Mason fitted the key to the padlock, removed the hook of the padlock from the hasp on the door, flung back the right-hand door, groped on the inside for the catch which held the garage door, then suddenly paused in mid-motion.
The beam of headlights from Lucille Barton’s car illuminated the legs of a sprawled figure which was stretched out on the floor of the garage. The shadow of the door hid the rest of the man’s body.
Abruptly the motor slowed and almost instantly sputtered and died.
Lucille Barton, jerking open the left-hand car door, came out from behind the wheel with one swift, leg-revealing motion. She dashed over to Mason’s side. “What’s that?” she demanded. “Who’s in there?”
Mason said, “That seems to be a man who’s either sleeping, drunk or dead. Suppose we take a look.”
He found the chain catch on the inside of the door, pulled it down far enough to release the door, swung it open a few inches, then stopped as reflected light from the headlights gleamed on the sinister red pool which had welled out from the bullet hole in the man’s head.
“Apparently,” Mason said, “he’s dead.”
She took a tentative step forward, then suddenly drew back. Mason could hear the hissing intake of her breath.
“Well?” Mason asked.
“What kind of a frame-up is this?” she demanded. “What have you been doing? What kind of a deal are you trying to rig up on me?”
Mason, moving so that he could look down on the features of the dead man, said, “I think, Lucille, we’ll put the question the other way. What sort of a deal have you been trying to frame on me?”
She said, “I’m beginning to see it all now — this whole business, this... all this stall about the gun and the car and the garage, and... so that’s why you wanted to go in the garage.”
Mason frowned, said nothing, but stood looking down on the body of Hartwell Pitkin who, by Lucille Barton’s own admission, had been her first husband. He was now very evidently quite dead.
Lucille, looking past him, suddenly recognized the man. “Oh, my God!” she exclaimed, and flung her arms around Mason’s shoulders to Steady herself.
Chapter 10
Mason said, “Lucille, you’re going to have to notify the police.”
She stood looking at him with startled, suspicious eyes.
“Now, then,” Mason went on, “when you tell your story to the police, try and make a better job than you did when you told it to me.”
“What do you mean?”
Mason said, “Let’s look at it from the police viewpoint. The man who is lying dead on the floor of that garage stood between you and everything you wanted in life. You had a chance to marry Ross Hollister. You couldn’t do it as long as Pitkin was alive. It took his death to clear the way for you to proceed with that marriage. Why beat around the bush about it?”
“Are you trying to insinuate that I’m — that I’m responsible for — for this?”
“I’m not,” Mason said, “the police will.”
“Oh, Mr. Mason,” she said, clutching his arm, “why did this have to happen to me?”
“It hasn’t happened to you yet,” Mason told her. “It’s happened to Pitkin. Now leave the car here. Come on in and telephone the police. You’d better switch off the lights on your car. Aside from that, leave everything just the way we found it. Come on now, we’ll go in and telephone the police.”
He took her arm, gently pulled her away from the vicinity of the body, then escorted her down the alley and up the steps of the apartment house.