“What do you mean?”
“About the various parties concerned — how much experience they have had in handling guns.”
“Well,” Drake said, opening a notebook, “if you want a list of the persons who would probably have missed George Lutts at ten feet, I can give them to you on the fingers of one hand.”
“Who?”
“Elkins, for one. He’s never fired a gun in his life. Your client, for another. She says she closes her eyes whenever she pulls the trigger. That’s what she told one of her friends. And if you want to consider Roxy Claffin as a suspect, she’s a lousy shot — at least, she’s supposed to be. Among other things, Enright Harlan was supposed to be teaching her how to shoot. Apparently, she wasn’t doing too well.
“Now, on the other side you have Regerson B. Neffs who claims to be a good pistol shot, or at least he was in his younger days. You have Enright Harlan, who is a most expert pistol shot. You have Herbert Doxey, who won a bunch of medals for pistol shooting. And you have Cleve Rector, who describes himself as a fairly good shot.”
Mason started pacing the floor. “How the devil did Lutts know that I had been retained by Mrs. Harlan, Paul?”
Drake shrugged his shoulders and said, “That’s one of the mysteries in the case. Apparently, he got it through his banking connections. When he went out to lunch with Doxey, he certainly didn’t have any idea. That is, he didn’t when he first sat down to lunch. But then he got some sudden inspiration and went to the telephone booth there in the restaurant and put through a call to someone, presumably some chap in the bank. Evidently, they traced the check you had placed in your account.”
“I don’t like that,” Mason said. “That would mean the violation of the banking code.”
“I know. But those things do happen.”
Again Mason started pacing the floor.
“Chief,” Della Street said solicitously, “I can see that you’re going to be up all night, pacing the floor, trying to get this thing straightened out.”
Mason, his face granite hard, said, “Well, we have some pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. Some of them fit and some of them don’t fit. I’m going to keep trying to shuffle them around until I find some combination which makes them fit.
“What results are you getting from your shadows, Paul? What is Roxy Claffin doing?”
“Gloating, mostly. She’s sitting on top of the world, with Enright Harlan like a sheep being led to the slaughter. She may be planning on subleasing her house. She’s started cleaning it out. She was out in her garage today, took all the old junk down to the dump and threw it away.”
Mason’s eyes narrowed. “What sort of junk?”
“Old empty paint cans, a broken trunk, a stool, some old inner tubes, some torn canvas sacks, and a box of battered up old scrap iron and stuff.”
“Where is all that?” Mason asked.
“Down on the dump, out there. It’s nothing. My man got a look at it when she loaded it, and then after she’d left he went out and inspected it.”
“Get that junk,” Mason said, “all of it. Where’s your man?”
“He’s off duty now. I can get him and—”
Mason said, “Dammit, Paul, in a case of this sort, don’t ever consider anything insignificant. Get that junk and get it in here just as fast as you can.”
Drake looked at his watch and sighed. “Okay,” he said.
“And those inner tubes. What’s wrong with them?”
“Evidently, Perry, she was just cleaning out the garage. She threw a bunch of stuff in—”
“I want that stuff, Paul. Get your men on the job. I want all of it.”
“You’ll have your office filled up with a whole garageful of junk,” Drake said wearily.
“That,” Mason told him, “is exactly what I want. You get that stuff and bring it here. Della and I will go grab a bite to eat. We’ll meet you here after... let’s see, nine o’clock.”
“Tonight?”
“Sure, tonight,” Mason said impatiently. “What the hell did you think? Tomorrow morning?”
“I didn’t know,” Drake said.
“Well, you know now,” Mason told him. “Come on, Della.”
Two hours later, Mason, Della Street and Paul Drake faced a crestfallen detective across Mason’s desk.
“What do you mean you can’t find ’em?” Mason asked.
Blanton, the detective, said, “That’s what I mean, Mr. Mason. They’re not there.”
“You must have got the wrong place,” Mason told him.
“No, I didn’t. I know right where she put them.”
“How do you know?”
“The same way I know anything. The same way I know where your office is.”
“What dump was this?”
“Well, it’s a dump out there about three miles beyond her place, out where there’s an old barranca they’re filling in. It isn’t used for a city dump, but the people who live around there throw stuff in it. It’s evidently been used for quite a while.”
“What sort of stuff?”
“Oh, tin cans, boxes... all kinds of junk.”
“Exactly what did Mrs. Claffin do?”
“Well, it was about seven-thirty this morning, about well, about half an hour, I guess, after she got up. She opened up her garage, and I could see she was doing stuff on the inside, so I moved my car around to where I could look in with my binoculars.”
“And what did you see?”
“Saw her loading things into this car.”
“Where was she putting the things?”
“In the rear storage compartment.”
“How good a view did you have?”
“Not too good at the time... real good later on.”
“When did you get this good look?”
“At the dump, after she’d left. I followed along, taking care that she didn’t realize that she was being spotted. Then when she drove out to the dump, I just went on past.”
“And then what?”
“Well, I went down the road... well, nearly a mile, I guess. I parked the car and looked through my binoculars. I saw her throwing this stuff on the dump and then she turned around and drove back to the house. I was supposed to be following her, but I thought I’d better take a look at this stuff on the dump, so I detoured back to the dump where I could see the stuff.”
“You got a good look at it there?”
“Sure, I got a good look. That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Mr. Mason. I went out to the exact spot on the dump and checked the stuff close.”
“Exactly what was it?”
“Well, there were some old inner tubes, there were some boards that had been on some sort of a packing case, there was a coil of old wire, and there was some scrap iron. There was a stool, a pretty good stool, some torn canvas sacks.”
“Tell me about the torn canvas sacks.”
“They had been pretty good sacks at one time, the money sacks that a bank uses for currency. They’d been sewn up and then ripped open along the sides. That is, they’d been cut open. And there was a box of old junk. There was scrap iron on the bottom.”
“What kind of scrap iron?”
“Bolts and nuts. All kinds of scrap. I remember there was a piece of iron rail in there and some sort of an iron wheel and... oh, maybe a couple of hundred pounds of junk.”
“She couldn’t have lifted a box of that kind into the trunk,” Mason said.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Mr. Mason. She just used the box to haul out all of this old scrap iron from the garage. She must have put the box in the back storage compartment of the car, and then chucked this scrap iron in it, and then after she got out to the dump, she just used one of the boards to pry this box out and dumped it and went away.