Tragg nodded to Della Street. “No hard feelings, Della. It was all in the line of duty.” He sat down and said, “How about one of your cigarettes, Mason?”
The lawyer gave Tragg a cigarette.
“Well,” Tragg said, “we’ve got most of it in the bag. We’re going to turn your golddigger loose. I wondered if you wanted to be on hand for the ceremony.”
“Of course I do.”
“I don’t blame you. It’ll be impressive. The deuce of it is I haven’t got a really good case as yet.”
“Suppose you tell me just what you’ve found out,” Mason said.
Tragg said, “I’d like it a lot better if you’d tell me how you knew what had happened.”
Mason said, “We held out a little evidence on you, Lieutenant.”
“Such as what?”
Mason said, “I deduced that Carson must have picked up that bullet from Faulkner’s desk and tossed it over his shoulder into the fish tank. Now, the only reason he would have done that would have been because he wanted to protect the person who fired the shot.”
“Meaning that he fired it?”
Mason said, “No. Meaning that someone else had, and he wanted to protect that person.”
“Who?”
Mason said, “When we went to Faulkner’s house the night of the murder, Mrs. Faulkner came tearing up in an automobile. She seemed in the devil of a hurry, but the way the exhaust smelled, I thought the choke must be nearly all the way out. That meant she’d been running with a cold motor, and that in turn meant she hadn’t come very far. So Paul Drake examined the car and found that the ash tray was empty. As he pointed out, a nervous person will almost invariably empty the ash tray of a car if there’s a long wait under tension.”
Tragg nodded and said, “I’ve done it myself.”
“Drake found the place where the ash tray had been emptied. It was a place from where you could see the front of the Faulkner house.”
“You mean Mrs. Faulkner was waiting for you to drive up?”
“That’s what I thought at the time,” Mason said, “and I damn near got a client convicted because the true solution didn’t occur to me.”
“What was it?”
“I was right in deducing that she had only come a short distance,” Mason said. “Her car had been parked earlier that evening at the spot where the ash tray had been emptied. I made the mistake of picking on the obvious and jumping at the wrong conclusion. It had been much earlier in the evening. It had been between five and seven instead of around the hour Sally Madison and I arrived.”
“And why should she have parked there at that time?”
“Because her husband had gone out, and Elmer Carson had taken advantage of his absence to go into the real estate office and start looking for that bullet. And Jane Faulkner, who had fired the shot at her husband in an attempt to get him out of the way, had been sitting there in her car, where she could see the entrance to the house, and blow her horn and warn Carson in the event Faulkner returned unexpectedly. In that event, Carson would have slipped out of the back door, gone through the alley, joined Mrs. Faulkner in her automobile, and been whisked away.”
Tragg’s eyes narrowed. “You think Mrs. Faulkner took that shot at her husband?”
“I’m satisfied she did. She pulled that sleep medicine stuff as a species of alibi. She’d managed to plant herself where she knew her husband was going to be driving his automobile. She planned to fire the shot, jump into her own car, take a dose of quick acting sedative, drive back to the house, undress, and go to bed. She fired the shot at her husband, all right, but she hadn’t realized the difficulty of shooting at a man in a moving automobile. She missed him by inches. The evidence shows that the only possible explanation of what happened is that Carson was protecting the person who tried to commit the murder. Obviously, Carson didn’t do it. Therefore, who was the person who had made the attempt, and whom Carson was trying to protect? I should have known when Mrs. Faulkner came driving up in her automobile in a terrific hurry and with the motor almost cold. She was trying to get home before her husband returned from that banquet, and her car was cold, not because she had been parked around there watching the house, but because she had been spending the evening in the arms of Elmer Carson, who lived, you will remember, within four blocks of Faulkner’s house.”
Tragg stared steadily at the pattern of the carpet as he correlated these points in his mind.
“That doesn’t make sense, Mason.”
“What doesn’t?”
“That elaborate attempt at getting the bullet earlier in the evening when they knew that Faulkner was going to be out at the banquet after eight-thirty. They’d have waited until then.”
“No they wouldn’t,” Mason said. “They knew that he was going to be at the pet store while there were still some minutes of daylight. They wanted to drain that fish tank and try and find the bullet, which seemed to have eluded them, while they still had daylight. If Faulkner had driven up and found the lights on in the office, it would have been a give away. And you’ll remember that since the duplex side of the budding was to be used as an office, there were no curtains on the windows, merely Venetian blinds on the south and west windows.”
“Well,” Tragg admitted, “you called the turn on Dixon. They telephoned Faulkner, told him they’d make the deal promptly at eight-thirty, but that he had to be there with the twenty-five thousand dollars; that if he wasn’t there at that exact moment, they wouldn’t make the deal.”
“What I can’t figure out, though, is why Faulkner paid out twenty-five thousand in cash and trusted to Dixon’s good faith to go through with the deal.”
“He had no alternative,” Mason said. “Besides, he knew Dixon wanted to buy his interest in the company.”
“Well, anyway, Faulkner dropped everything to rush out there. When he got out there, they raised the point about Tom Gridley. They weren’t buying any lawsuits. So Dixon called up Tom Gridley, and reached a deal with him over the phone by which Faulkner was to mail him a check for a thousand dollars. But how did Dixon and Genevieve Faulkner know all about that bullet business? I neglected to get that cleared up.”
Mason said, “How did they know everything else that went on in the company? There’s only one answer. Alberta Stanley, the secretary for the company, was in Dixon’s employ. When she told him about the bullet, he deduced what must have happened — just as I did when I heard of it.”
Tragg nodded. “Of course. The Stanley girl is the answer to lots of things.”
“What became of the check?” Mason asked.
Tragg grinned. “Just as you deduced, that was the one weak spot in Dixon’s armor. The postman was talked and bribed into giving the letter back to Dixon when the mail was collected. But I’m still a long way from pinning the murder on Wilfred Dixon.”
“Pinning the murder on him!” Mason exclaimed.
“Why, yes.”
“You can’t pin it on him,” Mason told the officer.
“Why not?”
“Use your head,” Mason said. “The person who killed Faulkner went to Faulkner’s house. He found Faulkner treating a goldfish for tad rot. He got Faulkner to stop his treatment of the goldfish and go get his fountain pen so that he could write some document, or sign some document. And then, after that document had been signed, and while Faulkner still had his fountain pen in his hand, Faulkner remembered about that check to Gridley and decided he’d make a stub that would cover the amount of the check. So he tore the check out of the book, started making out the stub, and was shot in cold blood by a man who had started to leave the house, but who saw Gridley’s gun lying on the bed, and couldn’t resist the temptation to put a bullet through Faulkner’s black heart.