The Case of the Caretaker's Cat (7 page)

"And," Mason said, "in order to show Nat Shuster that he can't cut corners with me and get away with it. Don't forget that angle, Paul."

"There's a public telephone in the drugstore around the corner," Drake said.

"Okay, Paul, let's telephone Ashton and telephone the district attorney."

They strolled around the corner. Mason dropped a dime in, dialed the number listed under the name of Peter Laxter, and asked for Charles Ashton. It took several minutes before he heard Ashton's rasping voice on the telephone.

"This is Perry Mason talking, Ashton. I don't think you need to worry any more about Clinker."

"Why not?" Ashton asked.

"I think that Sam Laxter is going to have his hands full," Mason explained. "I think he'll be kept quite well occupied. Don't say anything just yet to any of the servants, but I think there's a possibility Sam Laxter may be summoned to the district attorney's office to answer some questions."

The caretaker's voice was harshly strident. "Can you tell me what about?"

"No. I've told you everything I can. Just keep it under your hat."

There was growing uneasiness manifest in the tones of Ashton's voice. "Wait a minute, Mr. Mason. I don't want you to go too far in this thing. There are some reasons why I don't want the district attorney messing around asking questions."

Mason's tone was one of finality. "You employed me to see your cat wasn't poisoned. I'm going to do just that."

"But this is something else," Ashton said. "I want to see you about it."

"See me tomorrow then. In the meantime, give Clinker a dish of cream with my compliments."

"But I must see you, if the district attorney's going to start an investigation."

"Okay, see me tomorrow, then," Mason told him, and hung up. He made a wry grimace as he turned from the telephone booth and faced the detective.

"These damn cat cases," he said, "are more bother than they're worth. Let's go hunt up the district attorney."

"Sound as though he had a guilty conscience?" Drake asked.

Mason shrugged his shoulders. "My clients never have guilty consciences, Paul. And, after all, don't forget my real client is the cat."

Drake chuckled and said, "Sure, I understand, but just as a side line I sure would like to know where Ashton got that money… Listen, Perry, it's starting to rain. I'd prefer to use my car if we're going places."

Mason, thumbing through the telephone directory for the residence number of the district attorney, said, "Sorry, Paul, we're going places, but you won't have a chance to get your car – we'll be moving too fast… I'll get out my convertible. We can use that."

Drake groaned. "I was afraid of that. You drive like hell on wet roads."

"You know, Mason," he said, "I'm anxious to cooperate with you whenever cooperation is possible. I've told you before, and I'll tell you again, that I've a horror of prosecuting an innocent man; but I'll also tell you that I don't like to have anyone use me for a cat's-paw."

Mason sat silent. Paul Drake, sprawled in a chair, his long legs thrust out in front of him, kept his glassy eyes fixed on the toes of his shoes, and managed to look bored.

Burger started pacing the floor, his manner nervous. He flung his head around in a half turn as a bear might sniff the wind, and said, "You're a good lawyer, Mason."

Perry Mason sat quiet.

Burger pivoted on his heel, started walking in the other direction. He said, flinging the words over his shoulder, "But you're a better detective than you are a lawyer. When you turn your mind to the solution of a crime, you ferret out the truth. That doesn't keep you from defending guilty clients."

Mason said nothing.

Burger took one more turn; then stopped abruptly, swung to face Mason, leveled his forefinger and said, "If the people in my office thought that I was going to act on information you had given me, they'd think you were making a cat's-paw of me."

"That," Mason retorted, "is the reason I came to you personally instead of going to your assistants. Here's an opportunity for you to clean up something, and prove that what appeared to be an accidental death was in fact a murder. I'm not asking favors. I'm giving you an opportunity. You can take it or leave it. I'm interested in this thing because of a cat; and if you want to know, I'm making exactly ten dollars as a fee."

Burger pulled a cigar from his waistcoat pocket, tore at the end of it with his teeth, scraped a match along the bricks of the fireplace, and puffed the cigar into smoke. He sighed and said, "All right, Dr. Jason happens to be visiting me this evening. I'm going to call him in. If the thing sounds reasonable to him, we're going to make a whirlwind investigation. I'll know whether I want to go ahead or run for cover by the time the publicity breaks."

Perry Mason lit a cigarette.

"Excuse me just a moment," Burger said. "I'll call Dr. Jason, and I'll telephone Tom Glassman, my chief investigator, and have him come up right away."

As the door closed behind the district attorney, Paul Drake rolled his expressionless eyes toward Perry Mason. The detective's face was wearing its habitual expression of droll humor. "I notice you didn't tell him anything about the peculiar and sudden rise to affluence of your client, Charles Ashton."

"I'm only concerned with reporting such facts as may point to a murder," Mason remarked.

Drake turned his eyes back to stare at his toes.

"If I were a district attorney, I'm not so certain that I'd play along with you, Perry," he remarked.

"Whenever a man plays ball with me, he gets a square deal," Mason insisted.

"Yeah, but God help him if he ever tries to steal second," Drake said lugubriously.

The door of the room opened and Dr. Jason, a tall, rather thin man with brown eyes which were unusually piercing, surveyed the two men.

"Good evening, Mason," he said. "I don't think I know Mr. Drake."

Drake slowly doubled up his knees, arose from the chair, extended a languid hand.

"Glad to know you, Doctor," he said. "I've heard a lot about you from Perry Mason. I always remembered what he said about you when you'd been examining one of his clients on a sanity test."

"Indeed?" Dr. Jason inquired.

"Mason said that when you started worming your way into a man's consciousness, you were as persistent as the head of a wild oat working up a man's sleeve."

Dr. Jason laughed. "I only wish he'd say that publicly. It would be the best advertisement I could have. It doesn't exactly coincide with what he said about me to the jury in his last case."

District Attorney Burger, indicating chairs, puffed nervously on his cigar. "Doctor," he said, "I have a problem. A house burns, a man's body is found. Apparently he has burned to death in his bed. There was no suggestion of anything sinister in that death. Now, then, witnesses appear who can testify that a man, who might have profited very materially by the death of this person, was in a garage, with a flexible tube running from the exhaust pipe of his automobile to a hole cut in the pipe of a hot air furnace which led to this man's room. The fire may well have been of incendiary origin. Is it possible that sufficient carbon monoxide gas could have been introduced into the room in this way to have brought about the man's death?"

"Quite readily possible," Dr. Jason admitted, his eyes shifting from Drake to Mason.

"The man would have died in his sleep?"

"It is very likely. Carbon monoxide is a very insidious poison. There are numerous instances of persons who have been working in closed garages where motor cars were running and who died without being able to reach the outer air."

"How could you tell if a person died of carbon monoxide poisoning?"

"There are several methods. One of the most usual is to notice the color of the blood. It is a bright, cherry-red."

"And, if a person was burned to death, could you detect the presence of carbon monoxide?"

"Wait a minute," Dr. Jason said slowly. "You are overlooking something. If a person burnt to death, we would have every reason to expect that carbon monoxide would be present in his lungs. In fact, it might well be that the person had suffocated from monoxide incidental to the fire."

"In that case, Doctor, would it be possible to tell from an examination of the body whether the man had been murdered by this method before the house was fired?"

Dr. Jason's glittering eyes stared searchingly at Perry Mason. "How long before the fire was the monoxide introduced into this man's room by means of the automobile exhaust?"

"Probably two or three hours."

Dr. Jason nodded slowly. "I think," he said to Hamilton Burger, "that we could tell from an inspection of the body. It would, of course, depend somewhat upon the condition of the body after the fire. I would say that it would be quite possible to make this determination. Blisters, which are formed by heat when the tissues are able to react, usually vary greatly from evidences of heat applied after death."

"In other words, we should exhume the body?" Burger inquired.

Dr. Jason nodded.

Burger got to his feet with a peculiar lunging motion, as though about to charge some obstacle. "Well," he said, "if we're going to tackle this thing, we may as well make a good job of it. I'll get an order permitting us to exhume the body."

A grassy slope studded with marble headstones stretched from a circle of vivid illumination into a mysterious border of dripping darkness.

There was no wind.

Hamilton Burger, a big overcoat covering his broad shoulders, the wide collar turned up about his ears, was plainly impatient. "Can't you fellows speed it up a little bit?" he asked.

One of the shovelers cast him a resentful glance. "There ain't room enough for any more men," he said, "and we're working at top speed. We're almost there, anyhow."

He wiped a perspiring forehead with a soggy coat sleeve, and fell once more to rapid shoveling. A moment later the blades of one of the shovels gave forth a peculiar sound as it struck something solid.

"Take it easy," the other shoveler cautioned. "Don't let him rush you. We've got to get the dirt from around the edges before we can raise it up. Get ropes on the handles, and then these fellows that are just standing around can get some exercise."

Burger ignored the sarcastic comment, to lean forward and look down into the oblong hole.

Perry Mason lit a cigarette and stamped his soggy shoes. Paul Drake, sidling up to him, said, "Won't your face be red if the medico says the guy really burned to death?"

Mason shook his head impatiently.

"All I did was to report facts. Personally, I think they're going at this thing backwards. If they'd get Edith DeVoe and then drag Sam Laxter in for questioning they'd stand more chance of getting somewhere."

"Yeah," Drake said, "but then Burger would be out in the open investigating Peter Laxter's death. He's afraid that's just what you want him to do, so he'll sort of sneak up on the case from the back way and convince himself he's got a case before he makes any overt moves. He's played with you before, you know. He's a burnt child who dreads the fire."

"Well," Mason said disgustedly, "he's too damn cautious. This case is going to slip through his fingers if he isn't careful. He may dread the fire, but he can't cook dough into cake without using fire, and even then he can't eat his cake and have it too."

Tom Glassman, chief investigator for the district attorney, blew his nose violently. "What's good to keep from taking cold at a time like this, Doc?" he asked.

Dr. Jason said, unsympathetically, "Staying in a warm bed… They would have to pick a rainy night to do this. The man's been buried for days, but no one takes any interest in him until it starts to rain."

"How long will it take you to tell what you want after examining the body?"

"It may not take very long. It will depend somewhat on the extent to which the body was charred by heat."

"Bring out that coil of rope," one of the men in the grave ordered, "and get ready to pull. We can get the rope around the handles now."

A few moments later, with everyone straining on ropes, the coffin jerked, and started its uneven journey upward.

"Pull steady on them ropes, now; don't get it tilted up at one end, and take it easy."

The coffin reached the surface. Boards were shoved under it. Then the coffin slid along the wet, muddy boards until it rested on the firm ground.

One of the men produced a cloth and wiped the soil from the top of the coffin. A screwdriver made its appearance. After a moment, the lid of the coffin was swung back and a voice said, "Okay, Doc, it's all yours."

Dr. Jason stepped forward, leaned over the coffin, gave an exclamation, and tugged a flashlight from his pocket.

The men shuffled around in a circle, but, as yet, no one had picked up the gasoline lantern, so that the interior of the coffin was plunged in shadow.

"What's the verdict, Doctor?" the district attorney inquired.

Dr. Jason's pocket flashlight illuminated the interior of the coffin. His fingers moved the charred body.

"It's going to be hard to tell. The man's been burned to a crisp. I'll have to look for some place where clothing protected the skin somewhat."

"How about monoxide?"

"No need testing for that. It would be present anyway."

"Well, can you go ahead with your examination?"

"You mean here?"

"Yes."

"It would be difficult, and the conclusion wouldn't be final."

"Can you make a good guess?"

Dr. Jason sighed resignedly, started working with the screwdriver. "I'll answer that question in a few minutes," he said.

One of the men held a lantern. Dr. Jason, showing his resentment against the weather, his disapproval of the entire procedure, removed the top from the coffin. "Bring that light over here – no, not so close – don't let the shadow fall on the inside. That's right – stand about there… Oh, don't be so damned squeamish!"

He fumbled about in the interior of the coffin, took a sharp knife from his pocket. The sound of the blade ripping through cloth sounded startlingly distinct above the steady drip of the misty rain. After a moment he straightened, and nodded to Hamilton Burger. "You wanted a guess?" he asked.

"That's right, a guess – the best you can make, of course."

Dr. Jason dropped the lid back into position. "Go ahead with your investigation," he said.

Hamilton Burger stood staring moodily down at the coffin, then he nodded and turned on his heel. "Okay," he said, "let's go. You ride with us, Mason. Paul Drake can follow in your car. You take charge of the body, Doctor."

Mason followed Burger to the district attorney's car. Tom Glassman drove. The men were grimly silent. The windshield wipers swung back and forth in monotonous tempo, their steady throbbing sounding above the purr of the motor and the whine of the tires.

"Going out to Laxter's place?" Mason asked at length.

"Yes," Burger answered, "up to the place where they're living now – the city house I believe they call it. I want to ask some questions."

"Going to make any accusations?" Mason inquired.

"I'm going to ask some pretty direct questions," Burger admitted. "I don't think I'll make any definite accusations. I don't want to divulge just what we're trying to get at until I'm ready to do so. I'm not going to ask anything about the tube which ran from the exhaust until after I've laid a pretty good foundation. I think it would be better, Mason, if you and your detective weren't present when we asked the questions."

"Well," Mason said, "if you feel that we've done all we can, I know where there's a nice soft bed, a piping hot toddy, and…"

"Not yet," Burger interrupted. "You've started this thing, and you're going to stick around until we see whether we've drawn a blank."

Mason sighed and settled back against the cushions. The car made time through the deserted streets, climbed a winding road which ran up a hill. "That's the place up there," Burger announced – "the big place. Try not to use a flashlight unless you have to, Tom. I'd like to get a look at that garage before we alarm anyone."

Glassman eased the car in close to the curb, stopped it and shut off the motor. There was no sound, save for the beating of rain on the roof of the car.

"So far so good," he said.

"Got skeleton keys?" Burger asked.

"Sure," Glassman said. "You want me to get that garage open?"

"I'd like to take a look at the cars, yes."

Glassman opened the door, climbed out into the rain and turned a flashlight on the padlock which held the garage doors. He produced a bunch of keys from his pocket, and, after a moment nodded to Burger, and pulled back the sliding door of the garage.

The men opened the door of the garage.

"Be careful," Burger cautioned, "not to slam those doors shut. We don't want to alarm anyone until after we've looked the place over."

There were three cars in the garage. Glassman's flashlight flickered over them in turn. Mason stared with narrowed eyes at a new green Pontiac sedan. Burger, seeing the expression on his face, inquired, "Have you discovered something, Mason?"

Perry Mason shook his head.

Glassman's flashlight explored the registration certificates. "This one's in the name of Samuel C. Laxter," he said, indicating a custom-built sports coupe with spare tires mounted in fender wells on either side. It was a powerful, low-hung car of glistening enamel and chrome steel.

"Sure built for speed," Burger muttered. "Turn your flashlight down here on the muffler, Tom."

Glassman swung the beam from his flashlight to the exhaust pipe, and Burger bent over to examine it. He nodded slowly. "Something's been clamped around here," he said.

"Well, let's go have a talk with Mr. Samuel Laxter and see what he has to say for himself," Glassman suggested.

Perry Mason, leaning nonchalantly against the side of the garage, tapped a cigarette on his thumb nail, preparatory to lighting it. "Of course, I don't want to interfere, but there's just the possibility you might find that flexible tubing if you looked hard enough."

"Where?" Burger asked.

"Some place in the car."

"What makes you think it's there?"

"The fire," Mason pointed out, "originated at a point in or near Laxter's bedroom. The garage was some little distance from that. They managed to save the automobiles that were in the garage. That bit of flexible tubing was a damaging piece of evidence which Laxter wouldn't ordinarily have left where it could be discovered. Of course, he may have hidden it afterwards, but there's a chance it's somewhere in the car."

Glassman, without enthusiasm, pulled the trigger which raised the back of the rumble seat, climbed into the car, and started exploring with his flashlight. He raised the front seat, opened the flap pocket, prowled around in the back of the car.

"There's a compartment here that's locked," Burger pointed out.

"For golf clubs," Glassman explained.

"See if one of your keys will fit it."

Glassman tried his keys, one after another, then shook his head.

"See if you can't pull that piece out in the back of the front seat and see down into it."

The car springs swayed as Glassman's heavy body moved around. Then he said in a muffled voice, "There's something down here that looks like a long vacuum sweeper tube."

"Jimmy the door open," Burger ordered, his voice showing excitement. "Let's take a look."

Glassman pried the lock, saying as he did so, "This isn't a very neat job. It's going to lead to an awful squawk if we're wrong."

"I'm commencing to think we're right," Burger remarked grimly.

Glassman reached in his hand and pulled out some twelve feet of flexible tubing. On one end were two adjustable bands which tightened with bolts and nuts. The other end contained a mushroom-like opening of soft rubber.

"Well," Burger said, "we'll get Laxter out of bed."

"Want us to wait in here?" Mason inquired.

"No, you can come up to the house and wait in the living room. It may not be very much of a wait. Pulling him out of bed like this, he may confess."

The big house sat well upon a hill. The garage was some distance from the house, having been excavated from the earth. Cement steps led up to a graveled walk. A private driveway from the garage swung up a more gentle incline, and circled the house, serving both as a driveway by which cars might be brought to the front door, as well as a service road by which fuel and supplies might be delivered to the back of the house.

The men climbed the stairs, moving silently in a compact group. At the top of the stairs, Burger paused. "Listen," he said, "what's that?"

From the misty darkness came the sound of a metallic clink, and, a moment later, it was followed by a peculiar scraping noise.

"Someone digging," Mason said in a low voice. "That's the noise made by a spade striking a loose rock."

Burger muttered, "By George, you're right. Mason, you and Drake keep back of us. Tom, you'd better have your flashlight ready, and put a gun in the side pocket of your coat – just in case."

Burger led the way forward. The four walked as quietly as possible, but the graveled walk crunched underfoot. Glassman muttered, "We can do better on the grass," and pushed over to the side of the walk. The others followed him. The grass was wet, the soil slightly soggy, but they were able to move forward in complete silence.

There were lights in the house which showed ribbons of illumination around the edges of the windows. The man who was digging kept plugging away.

"From behind that big vine," Glassman said.

It needed no comment from him to point the direction. The vine was agitated by a weight thrust against it. Drops of rain cascaded down from the leaves, were caught in a shaft of light coming from an uncurtained diamond-shaped pane of glass in one of the doors and transformed into a golden spray.

The shovel made more noise.

"Scraping dirt back to fill up the hole," Mason remarked.

The beam from Glassman's flashlight stabbed through the darkness.