Now there was a girl! Old E. B. Jonathan, with his warped, distorted, jaundiced idea of the sex, suspected all women except clients. Clients to him were sacred. I took women as I found them. Mae Devers would stick through thick and thin.

  Mrs. Pemberton had paraded around in revealing silks and had called me Sir Galahad when I’d told her to go put on a bathrobe. The minute the going got rough, she’d tossed me to the wolves. The question was whether she either killed her husband while I was in the washroom or had gone back and killed him afterwards and deliberately imported me as the fall guy for the police. If she had, she’d made a damn good job of it.

  Supper consisted of a couple of cold hamburgers. About five o’clock, I drew up a chair in front of the window and started watching. The redhead had accused me of being a Peeping Tom and now I was going to be one.

  I didn’t see Diane Locke come in or go out, and I didn’t see anyone else I knew. After it got dark, a light came on in Diane’s apartment. I sat there and waited. About nine o’clock I had another hamburger. I got tired of waiting and decided I’d force the play. I looked up the telephone number of Bass & Pemberton’s office and memorised it. It was Temple 491. I shaved, combed my hair, put on a suit none of my new playmates had seen me wear, crossed the street, climbed the stairs of the apartment house and knocked on the door of apartment 3A.

  Nothing happened at once. I dropped to one knee, scooped dried chewing gum out of the hole in the door and looked through. She was coming toward the door. And she had her clothes on.

  I straightened as she came to the door, opened it, and asked, “What is it?”

  “I’m from the police,” I said in a thin, high, nasal voice this time. “I’m trying to check up on that call you put through to police headquarters last night.”

  “Yes?” she asked. She’d never seen me without a mask. “What is it you wanted to know?”

  “I’m trying to check your call,” I told her. “If you don’t mind, I’ll come in.” I came in before she had a chance to mind. I walked over to the chair and sat down. She sat down in the other chair.

  The chair I was sitting in was warm. “Pardon me,” I said, “was this your chair?”

  “No. I was sitting in this one,” she told me.

  She looked at me and said, “I’ve seen you before. There’s something vaguely familiar about your face. And I think I’ve heard your voice somewhere.”

  I grinned across at her and said, “I never contradict a lady, but if I’d ever met you, I’d remember it until I was a hundred and ten.”

  She smiled at that and crossed her knees. I looked over at the ashtray. There were two cigarette stubs on it. Both were smouldering. There was only one match in the tray. It was broken in two.

  She followed the direction of my eyes, laughed, and pinched out the stubs. “I’m always leaving cigarette stubs burning,” she said. “What was it you wanted?”

  I slid my hand under the lapel of my coat and loosened the gun. “Miss Locke,” I said, “you understand that the time element here is important. It’s a question of when you placed that call to the police, as well as when the police got here. We want to check carefully on all those times. Now, in order to do that, I’ve been checking your calls with the telephone company. It seems that you put through a call to Temple 491 very shortly after you called the police. Can you tell me about that call?”

  She studied her tinted fingernails for a minute, then raised her eyes and said, “Yes, frankly, I can. I called Mr. Pemberton.”

  “Why did you call him?”

  She said, “I think you’ll understand that I felt very close to Mr. Pemberton in many ways. He had-well, he’d tricked me and betrayed me, but, nevertheless... Oh, I just hated to make trouble for him. I called him to tell him I was sorry.”

  “Did you talk with him?” My throat was getting irritated from straining my voice high.

  Once more she hesitated, then said, “No, he didn’t answer the telephone.”

  “The telephone company has you on a limited call basis,” I said. “They report that the call was completed.”

  Once more she studied her fingernails.

  “Someone answered the phone,” she said, “but said he was the janitor cleaning up the offices. So I hung up on him.”

  That gave me all I wanted to know. I said, and I spoke in my own voice now, “You know, it was a dirty trick they played on you, Diane. I don’t think Bass cared whether you got anything out of it or not. He wanted Pemberton’s interest in the partnership. In fact he had to have it because he’d been juggling funds. He was the mythical ‘lawyer’ behind you. You’re his woman and he put you up to playing Pemberton for a sucker, hoping Pemberton would be involved enough so he could put into effect that trick clause in the partnership agreement and buy him out for two thousand dollars. When Pemberton said he was going to have an auditor make a complete analysis of the books for the purpose of finding out what a half interest was worth, Bass went into a panic.”

  She went white to her lips, but said nothing.

  I went on: “As soon as your ‘burglar’ left and you found you’d lost the letters, you called Bass up and told him what had happened. He was in his private office, waiting for a call, waiting also for Pemberton to come back and accept his offer as a final last resort.

  “But Bass was pretty smooth. He probably knew I wasn’t Olive Pemberton’s brother. He guessed I was a detective. That meant Olive was wise to the Diane business, and he was shrewd enough to figure there might be a dictograph running into Pemberton’s office. He did a little exploring. The door to the adjoining office was unlocked, and he stepped in, looked the plant over, and found the gun. Obviously either Olive or I had left the gun there. It could be traced to one of us. It looked like a set-up. Bass took the gun with him, did the job and returned it.

  “Killing Pemberton was his only out. Without the letters, his little blackmail scheme had fallen through. There’d be no money coming in to cover the shortage the audit would turn up. That meant he’d go to prison. Well, he’ll go anyway, and he’ll stay just long enough to be made ready for a pine box.”

  By this time the redhead had recognised me, of course. “You and your pearls,” she sneered, but the sneer was only a camouflage for the growing fright in her eyes.

  “Now,” I went on, “you’re in Bass’ way. Bass can’t have the police knowing he was behind the blackmail business, and you can show he was. He’ll have to try to get rid of both of us.”

  “Arthur would never do anything like that,” she cried.

  The closet door was in front of me. The bathroom door was behind me. But a mirror in the closet door enabled me to see the bathroom one. I kept my eyes on these doors.

  “He will, though,” I told her, “and you know it. He’s already killed once. Otherwise why did he come here tonight to tell you that under no circumstances were you to admit you’d talked with him over the telephone?”

  She moistened her lips with her tongue. “How do you know all these things?” she asked.

  “I know them,” I told her, “because I know that persons who have ever worked as forest rangers in the dry country make it an invariable habit to break their matches in two before they throw them away. I know that he was here the other night because there were broken matches in your ashtray. He’d sent you up to put the screws on Harvey Pemberton. I know that he’s here tonight. I know he was in the office last night. Just before you came in he’d been talking with Harvey Pemberton. I didn’t hear him take the elevator, so I know he went in to his private office after he’d finished that talk. He was still there when I left. I’m Wennick.”

  “But he wouldn’t have done anything like that,” she said. “Arthur couldn’t.”

  “But you did telephone right after those letters had been stolen, and told him about it, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I-“

  The door behind me opened a half inch. I saw the muzzle of the gun slowly creep out, but it wasn’t until I had my fingers on the butt of my own gun that I realised the barrel wasn’t pointing at me, but at her.

  “Duck!” I yelled.

  I think it was the sudden yell which frightened her half out of her wits. She didn’t duck, but she recoiled from me as though I’d thrown a brick at her instead of my voice. The gun went off. The bullet whizzed through the air right where her head had been, and buried itself in the plaster. I whirled and shot, through the door. I saw the gun barrel waver. I shot again, and then an arm came into sight, drooping toward the floor. The gun fell from nerveless fingers, and Arthur Bass crashed full length into the room.

  Old E. B. glowered at me with little, malevolent eyes which glittered from above the bluish-white pouches which puffed out from under his eyeballs. “Wennick,” he said, “you look like the devil!”

  “I’m sorry,” I told him.

  “You look dissipated.”

  “I haven’t shaved yet.”

  “From all reports,” he said, “you cleaned up this Pemberton murder case and were released by the police at Culverton with a vote of thanks, some time before ten o’clock yesterday evening. Cedric Boniface was in the law library, briefing the question of premeditation in connection with murder. He didn’t know what had happened until after the police had obtained Bass’ dying statement and you had left.”

  I nodded.

  “Now then,” E. B. said, “why the hell is it that you didn’t report to me?”

  “I’m sorry,” I told him, “but, after all, I have social engagements.”

  “Social engagements!” he stormed. “You were out with some woman!”

  I nodded. “I was out with a young lady,” I admitted, “celebrating her birthday.”

  He started cracking his knuckles. “Out with a young lady!” he snorted. “I had your apartment watched so I could be notified the minute you got in. You didn’t get in until six o’clock this morning.”

  I listened to the dull cracking of his knuckles, then grinned at him. “The young lady,” I said, “happens to have been born at five o’clock in the morning, so I had to wait until then to help her celebrate her birthday. If you doubt me, you might ask Mae Devers.”

  Leg Man by Erie Stanley Gardner first appeared in The Black Mask, February 1938. Copyright © 1938, 1966 by Erie Stanley Gardner. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd

 

 

  Erle Stanley Gardner, Leg Man

 

 

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