“That’s the dead man!”
Pandemonium broke loose in the crowded room.
Perry Mason turned to Rodney Cuff, made a little deprecatory gesture and said, “And there, Counselor, is your murder case!”
The entire end of the room where Weyman was struggling to escape became a seething mass of spectators. The coroner abandoned any attempt to secure order. The jurors themselves surged from their seats and joined in the melee. Perry Mason looked at his wrist watch, grinned at Coroner Scanlon, and said, “Thanks, Coroner, for the co-operation. I have fifty-seven minutes within which to go to my office, pick up my passport, and catch my boat for Honolulu, the Orient, Bali, Singapore, and wayplaces.”
Chapter sixteen
Perry Mason’s powerful roadster roared into pulsating speed, as the car swept down the road from Los Angeles to Wilmington.
“Well,” he grinned, looking at his watch, “we can just about make it — with luck. But we’ll be starting out with just the clothes we stand in. We won’t have any baggage aboard. It’s a shame all that new baggage of yours is going to be wasted.”
“Oh, no, it isn’t,” Della Street said. “Our baggage is all aboard.”
“It’s what?” Mason asked. “You mean—”
“Keep your eyes on the road,” she warned.
“What’s the catch?” Mason asked.
“No catch at all,” she told him. “You told me to fill that baggage with bricks, old shoes, or anything else. I saw no reason why I should do that, so, instead, I filled it with all my personal belongings. When I took it out of the apartment house I didn’t tell the transfer man to take it to the Trader’s Transfer Company, but told him to take it directly to the President Monroe. Just so Sergeant Holcomb thought it had gone to Trader’s Transfer Company was all that was necessary. And as for your baggage, I hired a valet to go out to your flat, pack up what you needed and ship it. I thought you’d neglect to do it.”
“Good girl,” Mason said, “I should have known you’d think of all the things I forgot— And so Holcomb thought the baggage was at Trader’s. I’m a little rusty about what happened after that because I was stacking the cards to have the inquest go the way I wanted it. What’s the lowdown?”
“Well,” she reported, “Sergeant Holcomb went tearing down to the Trader’s Transfer Company, hot on the trail of some baggage with the initials ‘D.M.’ on it. He found the baggage all right, and the more Trader tried to tell him it wasn’t mine, the more he thought Trader was in league with you. So he became pretty hostile and smashed open the baggage. He found a lot of property which had been surreptitiously moved from some of the buildings which had been fired by this gang of incendiaries. Of course, he didn’t know what it was at the time, but all of the fur coats and things made him suspicious. So he got in touch with the detective division and they identified the property in short order. So naturally, Sergeant Holcomb arrested me, and Judge Summerwaite signed the writ of habeas corpus and I got out just about the time Trader made some incriminating admissions.”
“Did Trader implicate Weyman?”
“Not by the time I’d left. He did implicate Prescott and this Diana Morgan. Now, suppose you be nice to a poor working girl and satisfy my curiosity as to what happened, and then give your undivided attention to your driving. Personally, I want to catch that ship.”
“Well,” Mason said, “it all started when I got to figuring the thing from the standpoint of psychology. I figured that Walter Prescott had the psychology of a murderer rather than that of a victim, so starting my reasoning in that goofy way, I got to wondering who his victim could possibly have been. And I began to think of Carl Packard’s disappearance. Then, suddenly, I saw a great light. Suppose Walter Prescott, as an insurance adjuster, had been standing in, either with or without Wray’s knowledge, with a gang of incendiaries. It would make a perfect set-up, and it wouldn’t have been the first time such a thing had happened. And if Packard had suspected Prescott, and was getting hot on the trail, Prescott would have been just the type to bump him off.
“But Carl Packard, who was a logical victim, couldn’t have been a victim because he’d shown up at the hospital and made a voluntary statement that the accident had been his fault; that he’d been looking at something he saw in the window — and then the whole thing clicked in my mind.
“Packard was getting close on the trail of the real firebugs. They decided to murder him in such a way it would be virtually impossible to bring home the murder to them. You can see what happened: Weyman, one of the conspirators, let the gang beat him up enough so that he looked as though he’d sustained minor injuries in an automobile accident. Then, when Packard started out for Walter Prescott’s house, Harry Trader, with his big van, followed along behind, and, at the proper moment, smashed Packard into the curb. He promptly unloaded Packard, put him in the covered van — and note that the covered van was an important factor in the conspiracy — and hustled off toward a hospital. The next time we contact the injured man is when he appears in the hospital. But, just as a stage magician frequently substitutes watches when he’s walking from the audience up to the stage, so the victims were substituted during that journey in the covered van.
“The more I thought of it, the more I realized how perfectly plausible such a murder would be. Jason Braun, alias Carl Packard, was put into the van in an unconscious condition. He may have been dying then. For all we know, he was immediately the victim of the brutal assault which smashed in his head in such a way that identification became virtually impossible.
“When the covered van arrived at the hospital, Weyman, feigning unconsciousness, took Jason Braun’s place and was carried out on the stretcher.
“Now then comes the masterly touch. Jason Braun was to disappear permanently. The conspirators wanted to make it seem that there was nothing suspicious about his disappearance. Therefore, they pulled that traumatic amnesia business, and Dr. Wallace fell for it, hook, line and sinker. He patched up Weyman’s face, and Weyman came back to his house, having poured a little whiskey on his garments, taken a few drinks, and put on the act of having been drunk and fighting again.
“Now, when he arrived at the house, his wife told him of the latest gossip of the neighborhood; of what Mrs. Snoops had seen in Walter Prescott’s house.
“Weyman immediately realized what a wonderful opportunity it would be to murder Prescott and get away with it. And Prescott was a thorn in the flesh of the incendiaries. For the one person who we absolutely know Jason Braun suspected in connection with this gang of firegugs was Walter Prescott. The conspirators were afraid that if Braun knew Walter was tied up with them, other people might know it. And they also knew that if Walter were arrested, he’d implicate them.
“As a sheer coincidence, and part of the act which the conspirators had put on at the hospital, Weyman, posing as Packard, had stated that the accident was his fault because his attention had been distracted by something he saw in the window of the house.
“So Weyman dropped over to call on Walter Prescott,who had gone to his house following the accident, after the departure of his wife, and prior to the arrival of Rita Swaine. Weyman put on gloves, took the gun from its hiding place, approached Walter Prescott casually, under the guise of friendship, and fired three shots into him before Prescott knew what was happening, then returned the gun to its hiding place, and left the house.