“And then telephoned me from the parking lot?”
Again she nodded. “I put the gun back in the glove compartment. Someone must have seen what I was doing and jimmied open the glove compartment and took out the gun while I was at your office.”
“That was after Lutts had been killed?”
“Of course.”
“Then how did it happen the fatal bullet came from that gun?”
“It couldn’t have, Mr. Mason. Either someone’s lying or someone switched the bullets after they were placed in the district attorney’s office.”
“Don’t be silly,” Mason told her. “You get me to try this case on that theory and you’ll be in the gas chamber.”
She met his eyes. “What other theory is there, Mr. Mason?”
Mason studied her. “I’m damned if I know,” he admitted.
“It’s all we have, the only chance we have. Please do as I ask you,” she said.
Mason watched her thoughtfully. “You’re not the type that likes to lie,” he said. “All of this is foreign to your nature. Now why did you lie? Was it because you killed George Lutts?”
“No.”
“Why?”
She hesitated for a moment, then poured forth the thoughts that were on her mind. “Mr. Mason, I never felt so downright cheap in all my life. I did lie to you. I lied to you because... well, when I got home to change my shoes and stockings, Ruth Marvel came over. She’s my closest friend. Her house adjoins mine, and when she saw me drive up in the cab, she came running over to see what was wrong. She knew I had taken my car with me when I left.
“Well, I confided in Ruth. I gave her the sketch, and Ruth, who is really very clever and who has excellent judgment, told me that since I hadn’t reported the thing to the police when it happened, I couldn’t possibly afford to do it then.
“I told her I was going to see you, and she said that was fine, but that a lawyer worked better on a case when he was enthusiastic about it. She said my first line of defence was to hope that no one knew I had been out there with Lutts, that police would find some clue pointing to the real murderer and that I’d never even be questioned, much less suspected.
“Then she said that if I should happen to be dragged into it, and they could prove I was out there with Lutts, the only other thing for me to do was to show that I had been in fear for my life.
“She told me to remember to tell you and to tell everybody else that I had heard the murderer walking around upstairs, that I had seen the hand and the gun—”
“You didn’t actually see or hear him?” Mason asked.
She shook her head.
“What did you see?”
“Nothing. I was listening to the radio down in the car. I didn’t even hear the shots. That’s the truth, Mr. Mason. The first thing I knew was that I went in there and he was dead. Of course, the murderer must have been in there at the time, and if I’d gone up the stairs far enough, he’d either have shot me or knocked me out and dashed out of the house. Apparently, Lutts was the only one he was after. When he heard me coming, instead of coming toward me, he must have retreated. He didn’t want me to see him. I had enough presence of mind to realize that. If I’d seen his face, then he’d have had to kill me, too. So I ran.”
“What about the car keys?” Mason asked. “How could you have been playing the radio if—”
“The keys were in the car, Mr. Mason. And I really and truly did have the radio turned on.”
“Loud?”
“Pretty loud.”
“Experiments show it would have to have been very loud for you not to have heard the shots.”
“Well, it was loud enough so I didn’t hear the shots, I can tell you that.”
“But police didn’t find the keys to the car,” Mason said. “They—”
“That’s where I made my big mistake, Mr. Mason.”
“You made a lot of big mistakes,” Mason said grimly. “What about those ignition keys?”
“It’s very seldom that I ride in a car with someone else. I’m usually driving. So when I get out of a car, I automatically take the ignition keys with me, and that’s what I did when I decided to go up and see what was happening in the house. I switched off the radio, took the ignition keys, went up the stairs, found Mr. Lutts dead, turned and ran screaming down the hill. It wasn’t until I got home that I remembered about the keys.”
“Then what did you do with them?” Mason asked.
“That’s one thing, Mr. Mason, they’re never going to trip me on. I hid those keys where they’ll never, never, never find them.”
“Does Ruth Marvel know where they are?”
“No. No one knows. And no one ever will know.”
Mason sighed. “Can’t you see what you’ve done? If you had told me this story, I could have given you some intelligent advice. You lied to me, and now you’re out on a limb. Moreover, you made the mistake of talking to Ruth Marvel.”
“No. It was all right to tell Ruth,” she said. “We can trust Ruth. She’d never breathe a word.”
“How do you know?” Mason asked. “Suppose the district attorney should subpoena her. If you had been talking to me, you would have been talking to your lawyer. The communication would have been confidential and privileged. Anything you told Ruth Marvel isn’t privileged. If the district attorney gets wind of it and puts her on the stand, she either has to tell what you told her or become an accessory after the fact.”
“But how in the world would he ever know—”
“He might get a lead,” Mason said, “because you got Ruth Marvel to go in that taxicab with you when you went out the second time. The way Hamilton Burger is preparing this case, I wouldn’t be too surprised if he hasn’t had detectives scouting the neighborhood and then letting the taxi driver — What’s the matter?” Mason asked, as he saw the expression on her face.
“He did ask Ruth Marvel to come to his office,” Sybil Harlan said in a panic. “He asked her some perfectly innocuous questions, and she was feeling very pleased with herself at the way she had handled herself, but... but—”
Mason said grimly, “If your friend, Ruth Marvel, had had a little more experience and a little less conceit, she wouldn’t have been feeling so smart. Now we’re in one hell of a fix.”
The bailiff called out, “Jury! Jury! Jury! Jury!”
The jurors filed into court, glancing curiously at Mason and the white-faced defendant.
Judge Sedgwick emerged from chambers and took his place on the bench.
Mason heaved a deep sigh and swung his chair around so as to face the witness stand.
Chapter 14
Hamilton Burger put on his case with the deadly, well-rehearsed precision of a lawyer who has carefully blueprinted every possible development.
He introduced a map of the premises. He introduced the testimony of the police officers who had been summoned when the body was discovered. The ballistic expert told of the characteristics of the fatal bullet and the test bullets and stated that beyond question, the fatal bullet had been fired from the revolver that had been found on the side of the steep hill.
The taxi driver, who had picked Mrs. Harlan up at the Union Station, had driven her to her house, then to the parking lot, and from there to the building where Mason had his office, made a positive identification.
By the time of the noon recess, the district attorney had laid all the statistical groundwork of the corpus delicti. By afternoon he was ready to put on his array of witnesses who would clinch the case against the defendant.
Veteran courthouse attachés, who were following the trial with interest, realized that Jerome Keddie, the taxi driver whose testimony Mason had riddled at the time of the preliminary hearing, was being saved until such time as the prosecution had forged such a deadly chain of evidence that the failure of Keddie to make an absolute identification would be a minor matter.