Chapter Twenty-Two

  As Hamilton Burger stalked angrily from the courtroom, Lt Tragg came over and gave Mason the benefit of his whimsical smile.

  “Well, Perry,” he said, “we all of us make mistakes. Every once in a while I deviate from good old-fashioned police procedure because I think I have everything I need and every once in a while I find I’m on the wrong side of the fence.

  “I certainly should have had the lights turned on and searched that place. Now then, how did you deduce what happened?”

  Mason said, “I began to feel that Gideon had an accomplice. I think that accomplice was someone whom he met in prison. There wasn’t an opportunity for him to have an accomplice otherwise. It must have been someone who was in prison and who was released within probably the first year after Gideon was incarcerated.”

  “But why would they have an association which would endure all that time, and–”

  Mason said, “Here’s Paul Drake coming now. I think he has the answer.”

  Paul Drake, hurrying into the courtroom, looked at the sprinkling of startled spectators talking in knots, at the empty bench where Judge Saxton should have been sitting, then hurried over to Mason and Lt Tragg. “What happened?” he asked. “What happened?”

  Della Street said, “The judge dismissed the case.”

  “Dismissed it?” Drake echoed.

  “That’s right,” Mason said. “Quite a few things happened this noon. What did you find out about the money, Paul?”

  “You were dead right. A deposit of forty-seven thousand dollars was made by mail. Just plain mail. The money was in an envelope with postage on it and nothing else. Naturally it aroused a lot of curiosity.

  “There have been no withdrawals, but at regular intervals since, small sums of money have been deposited to the account, so that it kept the account listed on the bank’s records as a live account.”

  “And the name of the man who deposited the account?” Mason asked.

  “Collister Damon,” Drake said. “And, of course, I only need remind you that Gideon’s full name was Collister Damon Gideon.

  “He undoubtedly had an accomplice who was released from prison shortly after he was incarcerated. That person couldn’t draw out the money, because he couldn’t establish his identity as Collister Damon, but anyone can make deposits to an account and once deposits are made the account continues to be a live account.”

  A plain-clothes man hurried into the courtroom and motioned to Tragg.

  Tragg said, “Excuse me,” went to talk with him, came back and said, “Well, Perry, I guess we’ve got the clues we need. Somebody had been touching an object that was greasy and when he jumped into that corrugated packing box he left fingerprints, enough so that they can be identified. Now then, we’ll go over the records of prisoners who were released from the federal penitentiary where Gideon was confined and see what we can find there.”

  “Good enough,” Mason said.

  “Perhaps you can tell me what happened between Gideon and the accomplice?” Tragg said.

  “Sure,” Mason said, “it’s only surmise but I think you’ll find it’ll work out once you get the accomplice.

  “They had a nice hide-out here in this deserted store. I think you’ll find the fingerprints of this accomplice on some of the cooking utensils and empty tin cans.”

  Tragg winced and said, “Let’s not rub it in, Perry.”

  “And,” Mason went on, “they were getting by all right until things went wrong and Gideon shot this night watchman. He lost his head completely. That put the accomplice in the position of having a possible one-way ticket to the gas chamber. Whenever two or more persons commit a felony, and a murder is committed in connection with the felony, all of them are equally guilty of first-degree murder. For all they knew, the watchman was going to die.

  “All of a sudden Gideon became hotter than a stove lid. He wanted out of town. He didn’t dare, under the circumstances, to try and draw that money out of the bank. He needed money and he needed it bad. He put the bite on me. He put the bite on Warren.”

  “Can you tell me what he had on you and what he had on Warren?” Tragg asked.

  “No, I can’t,” Mason said, “and it would help a lot if you’d not try to find out. You don’t need to, you know.”

  “Probably not,” Tragg said.

  “Anyway, Warren let the gun out of his possession. Gideon had a fight with his accomplice and Gideon tried to kill him. Gideon missed. The accomplice didn’t.”

  Tragg said, “Why should Warren have conveniently left the gun for Gideon to pick up? He – Now wait a minute, Gideon was putting the bite on everybody he could.”

  Tragg’s eyes narrowed. “I wonder if by any chance Mrs Warren was included in his list of victims. I wonder if she went down there with a gun and then Warren came in later. He found Gideon dead with the gun nearby and Warren picked up the gun, so as to protect his wife, pocketed it and was trying to make his escape when he heard sirens tearing down the street and assumed it was the police.”

  Mason met Tragg’s eyes. “Those,” he said, “are the things I wish you wouldn’t try to speculate about, Tragg. The accomplice will state that he killed Gideon in self-defence and I think perhaps he’s right. Gideon shot at him with the Warren gun. The accomplice retaliated with the gun they had been using in their hold-ups – the gun Gideon had had on the night the supermarket was held up.”

  Tragg was thoughtfully silent.

  “That’s all you need,” Mason said. “The federal boys can recover the forty-seven thousand dollars and there’s nothing left for you to worry about.”

  “But you want to keep your clients out of this?”

  Mason met his eyes, “I want to keep my clients out of it.”

  Silently, Tragg extended his hand and shook hands. “You’ve been a big help, Perry,” he said. “I don’t suppose you could go a step farther and give us some clue as to the identity of the accomplice, could you?”

  “Why not?” Mason asked.

  Tragg raised his eyebrows.

  “Think it over,” Mason said. “I had a sketch made of Collister Gideon. We know now that he was connected with that hold-up and shooting at the supermarket.

  “The night watchman who was wounded unhesitatingly identified the Gideon sketch as having a resemblance to the man who had done the shooting.

  “The other witness was positive that the sketch didn’t look like the man who had run out of the door. Yet it was the man who ran out of the door who had the gun.”

  Tragg said thoughtfully, “There could have been two men connected with the hold-up.”

  Mason grinned. “And the police found a man running down the street. If the man had tried to hide, they’d have grabbed him and charged him with being the accomplice, but because the man had enough presence of mind to run out in the middle of the street and start waving his arms at the police car trying to flag it down, the police fell for the strategy and–”

  “Good God!” Tragg interpolated. “Do you mean Drew Kearny was the accomplice?”

  “Of course he was the accomplice,” Mason said. “That’s why he wouldn’t identify Gideon. He didn’t dare to. He didn’t want Gideon to have any connection with that supermarket. He was hoping that the police would never find the gun he had left in the old warehouse after the shooting.

  “Kearny is clever as hell and a consummate actor. Take his fingerprints. Shake him down and you’ll find he has a criminal record, that he was in federal prison for a while when Collister Gideon was there, that Gideon confided in him, that Kearny came to this town, established a small business which gave him a legitimate front. From time to time he made deposits on the forty-seven-thousand-dollar account Gideon had established. He was waiting for the time when Gideon would be released and could draw cheques on the account without having the authorities censoring his mail.

  “Kearny is probably responsible for a whole chain of burglaries that the police would like to clear up. He was smart enough, however, to know that he had to keep his criminal activities entirely divorced from his legitimate activities; therefore he had a hide-out he had established in this old deserted building which was tied up in litigation. He would stay there when he wanted to pull a job. Probably his jobs were pulled, for the most part, on weekends. Of course I’m going on guesswork and probabilities, Lieutenant, but there’s no other explanation for that hold-up gun being the fatal gun which killed Gideon, and Kearny just had to be the accomplice on that supermarket job. That’s why he was running down the street, not toward the telephone, but away from the scene of the crime.”

  Tragg heaved a deep sigh. “Where would you have been if Kearny had got back to that warehouse and removed that gun before we found it?” Tragg asked.

  Mason looked at his watch. “Probably being sentenced for contempt of court right now,” he said.

  “Then you weren’t influencing the witness at all,” Tragg said. “The witness was drawing red herrings across the trail just as fast as he could.”

  “And because the watchman said the sketch of Gideon did look like the man he had surprised in the supermarket, the district attorney and the police were blaming me for having influenced the other guy’s testimony,” Mason said.

  Abruptly Tragg threw back his head, laughed, and said, “Well, I guess we’ll get busy on a round-up, Perry.”

  “Going to take Hamilton Burger in on it?” Mason asked.

  Tragg said, “I think I’ll keep out of Burger’s office for a few hours, if you don’t mind, Perry.”

  “I don’t mind in the least,” Mason told him.

  The End

 

 

  Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Phantom Fortune

 

 

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