“Lunk was her accomplice. She’d groomed and trained him carefully in the details of what he had to do. All she had to do that afternoon was call him up after she heard from Leech and tell him to go ahead.”
Della objected, “But I thought Franklin Shore hadn’t told Matilda or anyone about Helen’s getting tight on the punch or rescuing the—”
Mason laughed. “Lunk, pretending to be Franklin Shore on the telephone, told Helen he hadn’t said anything to Matilda.”
Della said, “Well, I’ll be... So Lunk came up to the house to get the gun — and shot to keep from being caught doing it.”
“Yes. He crawled through the window, upset a night stand, and thinking fast — no fool, Lunk — tried to cover up by making sounds as though Mrs. Shore were walking across the room. He hobbled over to the desk, got the gun, and was just getting over toward the window when Jerry Templar opened the door and started to turn on the light. He fired a couple of shots, dropped to the ground, and then beat it back to his shack, probably in his car.
“Lunk was lying about not having gone to bed. He had been in bed when Matilda telephoned. When he went back to the shack, he hid the gun in the flour. Then he turned down the bed in the back bedroom, lay in it long enough to wrinkle the sheets, planted the cigar butt, then dumped the things out of the bureau drawer, and out of the closet. He took a street car to go back to the Shore house, hoping the police would pick him up and question him. Reluctantly he’d tell the story Matilda had cooked up about Franklin Shore turning up at his shack. The police would high tail it over there, and find all the planted evidence that Shore had been there but flown the coop after robbing Lunk. Of course, Lunk never expected they’d search the flour can. That was his own, particular secret hiding place... and they wouldn’t have searched it either if it hadn’t been for me.”
“How do you know all this?” she asked.
“The kitten’s actions show conclusively that the bed in the front room was warm. The one in the back room wasn’t. That is the key clue to the whole business. Lunk got up out of bed. The bed was warm. The kitten climbed in that bed. Lunk came back to hide the gun and the kitten got in the flour, was chased out, went to the bed in the back bedroom, jumped up on it, found it was cold, remembered the warm bed in the front room where it had previously been lying, and went back there to curl up and go to sleep. Lunk went out with his carefully prepared story for the police, expecting to run into them at the Shore residence. You picked him up instead. He wasn’t particularly anxious to tell his story to us because he wanted to tell it to the police yet he had to pretend that he didn’t want to have anything to do with the police. He was afraid I wouldn’t pass it on to the police fast enough, so the minute he was free to do so, he gave an anonymous tip to Lieutenant Tragg over the telephone which resulted in his being picked up.
“Matilda had it planned out to kill a lot of birds with that one .38 slug by making it appear her husband was still alive and had done the job. Incidentally, his being alive — and of course the police would never be able to find him — would keep Gerald Shore and Helen from probating the estate, keep Helen from becoming financially independent, and save forty thousand dollars in legacies.”
“But why did she have Lunk telephone Helen?”
“Don’t you see? That’s the significant part of the whole business. Helen was the only one who really couldn’t have recognized Franklin Shore’s voice. She was only fourteen when he left. There’s a great difference between fourteen and twenty-four. Lunk could deceive her, where his voice probably would not have deceived Gerald.”
“What about Franklin’s personal belongings in the car beside Leech?”
“Matilda got out some of her husband’s old things and wrapped them up in one of his handkerchiefs and took them out with her. The laundry mark was a giveaway. Franklin Shore wouldn’t have carried the same handkerchief for ten years. The fact that the watch was wound up at around four-thirty shows that that was when Matilda got things ready to go out on her little hunting trip. People don’t wind watches at four in the afternoon. It’s so plain it stands out like a sore thumb.
“You know, Della, she might have got away with it if it hadn’t been for Amber Eyes. It was shrewdly worked out. She did one stupid thing, though.”
“What?”
“That note, supposedly from Leech, directing us out to the reservoir that she mailed on the way back from the murder. She wrote it as a Jap would, trying to pull Komo in as a red herring to confuse the trail. That wasn’t very smart.”
“But why was Leech blackmailing her?”
“He found out the truth.”
“What truth?”
“Remember the body that was found at about the time Franklin Shore disappeared — the unidentified body?”
“You mean that was Franklin Shore? Why, Chief, that’s impossible. That...”
“No, it wasn’t Franklin Shore. It was Phil Lunk.”
“Phil Lunk?” Della gasped.
“You see, Matilda Shore didn’t love her husband. What’s more he was about to ruin the man she did love. If Matilda could get Franklin out of the way, she would inherit his fortune and be in a position to indulge her lust for power; she could save Stephen Alber financially, and, later on, marry him. Our friend Lunk was her man Friday from the beginning. His brother was dying. They knew that his death was only a matter of days — perhaps hours. Matilda laid her plans with that in mind. When he died, the doctor who had been in attendance came in response to Tom Lunk’s call, and quite properly filled out a death certificate. But the body the undertaker picked up was that of Franklin Shore who had previously been given a dose of quick-acting poison. His body was waiting — probably outside in Lunk’s car, all ready for a quick switch. After disposing of his brother’s body, Lunk whisked Shore’s body off to the East to bury in place of his brother, and later lied about the time he’d left, saying it was before Shore’s disappearance.”
“But he had a mother in the East. Wouldn’t she have known it wasn’t the brother Phil?”
Mason grinned. “You’re still believing everything Lunk told you! I’ll bet you that five bucks I won from you today that when Tragg investigates, he’ll find Lunk never had lived in the place to which the body was taken for burial. Now here’s another clue. George Alber went to Lunk’s shack about midnight. Lights were on, but there was no sound from the inside. Lunk says he was listening to the radio before Franklin Shore came. If that had been true, Alber would have heard either voices or the radio.”
“But how about that post card from Florida?”
“That post card is really as much of a giveaway as what the kitten did,” Mason said.
“How?”
“Don’t you see? Because it was written in the winter of 1931, not the spring of 1932.”
“How can you tell?”
“He said he was enjoying the mild climate,” Mason said. “Florida has a good summer climate; but people don’t talk about enjoying a mild climate except in winter. Then he says, ‘believe it or not,’ he’s enjoying the swimming. He certainly wouldn’t have said that if he’d been writing from Florida in the summer, because then there wouldn’t have been any ‘believe it or not’ about enjoying the swimming.”
“But the card was postmarked in June of 1932.”