“Milicent didn’t learn about the ninety thousand embezzlement until the day of the murder. When she found it out, she was furious. She obviously knew her husband was going to the cabin, and decided on a showdown. She couldn’t find her own gun, but her father had a gun that was in the house. She picked it up and started up to the cabin. That, however, was after Martha and Smiley had gone to the cabin. She parked her car near the turnoff to the cabin and then became hysterical, and the very force of the nervous storm served to calm her and give her a sane perspective on what she was about to do. She went back and threw the gun away, met Adele, started back to the house. Dr. Macon picked her up in Kenvale. She told him about what had happened. Macon wanted her to go back to the cabin, either to remove some evidence indicating she had been there, to find the gun she had thrown away, or because he didn’t entirely believe her story and wanted to check up on what had happened... They got to the cabin well after dark, unwittingly passing Martha and Smiley in the dark on the road, found Jack Hardisty dying. Milicent said she knew nothing about it. You can hardly blame Dr. Macon if he didn’t believe her.”
“But who killed him?” Della Street asked.
“Martha Stevens gave him a hypodermic of scopolamine,” Mason said. “When Jack told them about hiding the money in the tunnel, he wasn’t faking. He was telling them the simple truth. They went up to the tunnel, and the money wasn’t there. That means someone must have beaten them to it. That person must have removed the money almost as soon as Hardisty had buried it, and then gone on down to the cabin. We can reconstruct what happened then. He found Jack Hardisty drugged and talkative, telling the absolute truth under the influence of the drug. He found the car in which Martha and Smiley had driven up, and of course, Hardisty’s car was there also. Hardisty’s glasses were broken. He was probably sitting on that big rock outcropping, and the gun which Martha had surreptitiously taken from Milicent Hardisty was lying there on the pine needles where Smiley had thrown it when he hit Hardisty.
“Now this newcomer must have been a friend of Hardisty’s; more than a friend — a partner, an accomplice. And he must have been planning to kill Hardisty for some time.”
“How do you know that?” Della asked.
“The evidence shows it. When he’d planted that alarm clock the first time, he intended to use it to manufacture an alibi. But he didn’t use it because that day Beaton didn’t put the camera in that location, and, instead of staying to watch the cameras that night, he took Myrna Payson to a movie.”
“But why would this partner want to kill Hardisty?”
Mason smiled. “Put yourself in his place. Hardisty had got caught. Hardisty was going to jail. He was Hardisty’s accomplice — and if he had Hardisty out of the way, he’d not only seal his lips but be ninety thousand to the good with no one ever suspecting... The first embezzlement had been a scant ten thousand. That represented money they’d ‘borrowed,’ probably to finance a mining venture or horse races or stock gambling. The ninety thousand embezzlement was an attempt at blackmail, and it didn’t work.
“Put yourself in Burt Strague’s position. Jack Hardisty was going to the penitentiary. If Jack talked, Burt Strague would also go up as an accessory. He had intended to make away with Hardisty if he could do so safely. That’s why he first planted the alarm clock where he expected Rodney Beaton was going to set up one of his cameras. He was arranging in advance to give himself an alibi... He came on Jack Hardisty, drugged. Jack Hardisty probably told him he had left some incriminating evidence in that writing desk, evidence that showed the original embezzlement had gone into a joint venture with Burt Strague. And he also told Strague that Martha Stevens had drugged him and that he’d told them where he’d left the money, that he was tired of it all, that he didn’t have the nerve to go through with it. When Martha and her boy friend returned from the tunnel, Hardisty was going to tell them everything.”
“Where was Milicent all this time?” Drake asked.
“At that particular moment she was probably just parking her car at the turnoff, and starting to walk to the cabin. However, she never did get there. She had hysterics, went back to the road, threw the gun she’d taken with her — her father’s gun — away. She then met Adele, went back as far as Kenvale, met Dr. Macon, talked with him and finally returned to the cabin at Dr. Macon’s suggestion. Probably Macon wanted to find that gun — and he may have doubted if Milicent’s recollection of what had happened while she was hysterical was entirely accurate.
“When he arrived he found Hardisty in bed, dying from a gunshot wound. He naturally assumed Milicent, in her hysteria, had gone a lot farther than she remembered, and that a merciful amnesia had blanked the worst part of what had happened from her mind. That frequently happens in hysteria. In fact Legal Medicine and Toxicology by those three eminent authorities, Gonzales, Vance and Helpern, mentions hysteria as an authentic cause of amnesia. So you can begin to see Dr. Macon’s position. He felt certain the woman he loved had killed her husband, probably in self-defense, had become hysterical and the hysteria had erased the memory from her mind.
“But to get back to Burt Strague and Hardisty. There was an argument. Hardisty blurted out some things he shouldn’t have said. Burt Strague shot him, probably in a struggle. Then, alarmed, he got the wounded man up to the cabin and into bed. He realized Hardisty was dying. He knew that the mud on Hardisty’s shoes would show that he’d been to the tunnel. Naturally, he cleaned the shoes, because Burt had removed the money buried there in the tunnel almost as soon as Hardisty had driven away, and he wanted Martha and Smiley to think Hardisty had lied about the tunnel.
“Burt Strague knew that Martha Stevens and her boy friend would very shortly return from their fruitless search of the tunnel. He jumped in Hardisty’s automobile, drove it down the grade and off over the embankment. That got rid of the automobile... He didn’t have a chance to dispose of some of the other evidence, as he would have liked to. Not until the next morning did he get a chance to dig up his clock — and he had to burglarize the writing desk in the Hardisty residence. That was a ticklish job. When it came to doing it, he relied on the alibi he had already cooked up.”
“But how could he have left his picture in the camera,” Della Street asked, “if he wasn’t actually there?”
“Very easily,” Mason said. “With his own camera, he took a flashlight picture of himself walking along the trail. He kept that undeveloped negative in reserve. When Rodney Beaton set up his camera, which was probably right after dark, Burt, taking care to avoid tripping the string which would release the shutter, went up and left tracks in the trail. Then he unscrewed the first element of the lens, inserted the carbon paper disk, replaced the lens, and substituted his exposed film for the one that was in that camera. Remember that it was dark by this time, and he could work by a sense of touch without needing a darkroom. He buried his alarm clock, adjusted the mechanism so it would trip the string and shoot off the flashbulb at the proper time, and then beat it for Roxbury. Remember his slender build. He dressed himself in his sister’s clothes, slugged the guard, broke open the desk, got what he was after, returned to the mountains, removed the carbon paper disk from the lens, then went to the Blane cabin, and told the story of having searched all over for Rodney Beaton and his sister... Those are the high points. You can fill in the details.”