The Case of the Stuttering Bishop (20 page)

Mason took the list, nodded and said, "Come on, we're going places." He snapped on the ignition, slammed the car into gear and started driving at high speed back towards Los Angeles.

"What did you think Drake was going to find aboard the Atina?" Della Street asked.

"Frankly," he told her, "I don't know."

"Why didn't you stay to find out?"

"Because," he said, "I doped out a theory of the case which may hold water."

"What is it?"

"I'll tell you," he said, "when I see whether it checks out. In solving a crime, a man has to figure out lots of theories. Some of them hold water, and some of them don't. A man who wants to build up a reputation for himself will keep his thoughts to himself until he knows that they check out."

Her eyes were tender as she studied his profile. "Do you want to build up a reputation for yourself, Chief?" she asked softly.

"And how!" he told her. They made the rest of the trip in silence. Mason brought the car to a stop before a hospital. Together they entered the office, and Mason said, "We want to look at the man who was picked up with a fractured skull on the morning of the fifth."

"He's not allowed visitors and…"

"I think," Mason said, "we can identify him."

"Very well. One of the internes will permit you to enter the room. He's still unconscious. You'll have to promise to remain absolutely silent." Mason nodded. The girl pressed a bell and said to a white-robed intern who appeared, "Please take these parties to 236. It's a matter of identification. They've promised to remain silent."

They followed the intern down a corridor and into a ward past long rows of beds to a cot which was in a corner hidden by screens from the rest of the ward. The intern folded back one of the screens. Della Street gasped, and her hand shot to her throat.

Mason stared down at the unconscious figure, then nodded to the intern, who replaced the screen. Mason pulled a roll of bills from his pocket. "See that this man has the best medical attention money can buy," Mason said. "Transfer him to a private room and give him a day and a night nurse."

"You know him?" the intern asked curiously. Mason nodded and said, "The man is Bishop William Mallory of Sydney, Australia."

Della Street, perched informally on the corner of the desk, grinned across at him and said, "All right, Mr. Human Enigma, what's the theory? It's held water, so kick through and tell me what it is. Don't be such a tightwad. How did you know that was Bishop Mallory, and what did you expect Drake was going to find aboard the Atina?"

Mason studied the twisting smoke from his cigarette for a few seconds, then began to speak in a low, meditative voice. "Julia didn't intend to kill Brownley, but she did want him to go down to the beach. Therefore, there was something she expected to do when he was at the beach, something which was important enough so that some other people were willing to kill Brownley in order to keep him from doing it.

"Now there's only one answer, only one logical conclusion. Janice Seaton looked enough like the dead Oscar Brownley so that the minute Renwold clapped eyes on her he'd know she was Oscar's daughter, and, since Oscar only had one daughter, that would put the fake Janice Brownley out on the end of a limb. So, naturally, when Stella realized that Julia Branner had some hold by which she could make Renwold Brownley go to the beach, and knew that while he was at the beach he was going to be confronted with his real granddaughter, whose features would be unmistakable proof of her identity, Stella was faced with a show-down. She didn't care on her account. What she did was done through mother-love, a warped mentality, and because of a situation a couple of crooks had engineered her into. She had a rain coat which was very similar to that worn by Julia Branner, which was probably a coincidence, because she didn't intend to be seen, but she did intend to kill Renwold Brownley with Julia's gun, so she loaned Julia her car and then made arrangements to get another.

"Now then, look at the case from the other end. Julia evidently knew that the matured Janice Seaton was the spitting image of Oscar Brownley. This was one bit of irrefutable proof none of us had taken into consideration. But how did Julia know it? The only way she could possibly have known it is that she must have seen Janice arriving here from Salt Lake City. Since only Bishop Mallory knew the whereabouts of the real Janice, it follows, therefore, that Mallory must have met her and brought mother and child together before Julia Branner came to my office and before Drake's men got on the job shadowing Mallory at the Regal Hotel.

"Now then, Julia wanted Renwold to go to the beach. She was going to meet him. She was going to take him to Janice Seaton, and she intended at that time to furnish Brownley with unmistakable proof of Janice Seaton's relationship to him. Therefore she must have intended, first, to show him the family resemblance, and, second, to confront him with Bishop Mallory. Therefore Bishop Mallory was to be someplace at the beach; but Bishop Mallory knew he was being followed, knew that an attempt had been made on his life and doubtless surmised that the people he was fighting would be only too willing to murder Janice Seaton if they could locate her, so Bishop Mallory went to the beach and disappeared. He used the Monterey as a means of disappearance. He might have chosen any one of a dozen different stepping stones toward invisibility. The reason he chose the Monterey was because it was conveniently located. Therefore, he must have arranged for a hiding place near the waterfront, and he had been called on earlier in the day by Cassidy, who was the owner of the Atina.

"What's more reasonable than to suppose that Bishop Mallory and Janice were waiting for Julia and Renwold Brownley aboard the Atina? The bishop was smart enough to know that the other side would kill Janice if they had a chance, and therefore Julia had insisted that Renwold Brownley was to come alone. She was to meet him at a spot close enough to enable her to take him at once to the Atina, yet far enough removed from the place of concealment so the other side wouldn't know where Janice was hidden, if Brownley should mention where he was going.

"Now notice the peculiar series of events which are so closely interwoven that they fairly scream at the real solution. Stella Kenwood started out on her own, determined to kill Renwold Brownley, but she says her daughter wasn't to know anything about it, because she didn't want to involve her daughter in murder. She was making a mother's sacrifice. Philip Brownley talked with his grandfather just before Renwold left for the beach. Renwold Brownley told Philip generally what was in the note, and said he was to meet Julia Branner and go aboard a yacht. Philip Brownley didn't hear him clearly, because as soon as he heard the word 'beach' and 'yacht' the association of ideas made him think at once of his grandfather's yacht which was moored at the beach, so young Brownley reported to the fake granddaughter that Renwold had gone down to meet Julia aboard his yacht, and the fake Janice reported over the telephone to Victor Stockton, who must have arranged at once to kill Brownley and to get an ironclad alibi for Janice, who would be a logical suspect. Now why does a man arrange an alibi in advance?"

Mason paused to peer steadily at Della, who, with a little gasp, said, "Why, because he knows he's going to need one."

"Exactly," Mason said. "In other words, the minute Victor Stockton went to such elaborate pains to give Janice Brownley an alibi, it was because he knew she was going to need one. Therefore, he knew that Renwold Brownley was going to be murdered, but he didn't know Stella Kenwood had already arranged for the murder, because Stella wasn't going to let her daughter know anything about it.

"Therefore Stockton worked out a swell scheme for a murder. Janice was to come to his house, but leave her car parked some four blocks from his place. She probably didn't know what Stockton had in mind. Stockton's accomplice could then take Janice's car to the beach to lie in wait for Renwold. Renwold would recognize Janice's car. He had unlimited confidence in Janice and would unhesitatingly approach the car, to be met with a fusillade of shots which would kill both Julia and Renwold Brownley. So Peter Sacks picked up Janice's car as soon as she left it. He rushed to Brownley's yacht, intending to kill Brownley and, perhaps, Julia Branner. Now Sacks had received his information through Stockton, who, in turn, had received it from Janice, who thought Renwold was going to his yacht instead of to another yacht.

"Therefore, at the time of the murder, we have Julia Branner waiting at the beach to make certain Renwold was driving alone and was not followed. We have Stella, who had arrived on the scene first, determined to kill Brownley. We have Peter Sacks waiting in Janice Brownley's automobile in front of Renwold Brownley's yacht, and we have Bishop Mallory and Janice Seaton waiting aboard the Atina, which was also moored in the yacht basin.

"When Stella pulled the trigger of the automatic, the shots were plainly audible to both Sacks and the bishop. Both must have realized what those shots might mean. Harry Coulter was driving a car, and the sound of his motor and the rain on the roof kept him from hearing the shots. Bishop Mallory didn't have a car, so he started for the scene of the shooting on foot. Sacks started in Janice Brownley's car and therefore was the first to arrive. He saw what had happened, probably made a closer examination than Bixler had and saw Brownley wasn't dead. He slid into Brownley's car, threw it into gear, ran it to the nearest pier, pointed it for the bay, left it in low gear and opened the hand throttle. Then he went back to Janice's car and started to drive away, only to encounter Bishop Mallory running toward the scene of the shots. Sacks recognized the bishop, swung the car toward him and smacked the bishop down, fracturing his skull and probably thinking he'd killed him. But he didn't want Bishop Mallory found there, so he loaded him into the car, carried him to the outskirts of Los Angeles and then dumped him out, after first removing all evidence of the bishop's identity and…"

Mason was interrupted by Paul Drake's code knock on the door. "All right, Della," he said, "let's see what Drake's uncovered."

Della started to the door, paused halfway to say, "But why wouldn't Julia Branner have talked, and why wouldn't Janice Seaton…?"

"Because," Mason said, "Julia Branner thought Bishop Mallory and her daughter were keeping quiet because of some very important reason. She wasn't going to say a word until she knew where they stood. Janice Seaton knew that Bishop Mallory had placed her aboard the yacht telling her not to move from it until she heard from him. She probably thought there had been some trouble in getting Renwold Brownley to come down to the yacht. Unless I miss my guess badly, she doesn't even know anything about the murder."

Della Street nodded, opened the door. Drake burst excitedly into the office and said, "You'll never guess what we found aboard that yacht, Perry – not in a hundred years! We found…"

Della Street interrupted him to say, "Janice Seaton, still waiting for Bishop Mallory to return. She didn't even know Renwold had been murdered."

Drake stared at her with his mouth sagging open. "How the hell did you know?" he asked.

Della Street closed her right eye in a surreptitious wink at Perry Mason. "Elementary, my dear Watson," she said, "elementary. My feminine mind reasoned it out from the facts of the case."

Drake sat down weakly in the nearest chair. "I," he announced, "will be damned."

"Where does that put everyone?" she asked.

"It makes Stella Kenwood guilty of a technical assault with a deadly weapon. It makes Peter Sacks and Victor Stockton guilty of first degree murder. The autopsy shows Brownley would probably have bled to death from a bullet wound which had severed one of his large arteries, but it also shows unmistakably that his death was actually caused by drowning."

"Can the district attorney prove the conspiracy between Sacks and Stockton?"

Mason grinned and said, "That's up to him. I'm not running the district attorney's office, but I think he can. Stockton left himself wide open when he arranged such an elaborate alibi for Janice before he had any reason to believe Brownley was going to be murdered."

"I take it," she said slowly, "that in the future Burger won't be so quick to issue warrants for your arrest."

Mason grinned and said, "As a matter of fact, Burger has asked me if I'll have dinner with him this evening. He wants to 'talk over the case.' Now that Bishop Mallory's regained consciousness and is going to live, Burger's got a pretty good case. I drove over to the hospital this morning to see the bishop. Mallory remembers seeing the yellow coupe, saw it swerve and deliberately drive into him. That, of course, is the last he remembers, but with the dent on the fender and human bloodstains on the back of the seat, Burger's got a pretty good case of circumstantial evidence. And remember, these men are rats. They'll turn on each other when it comes to a show-down, particularly if the D.A. can make Sacks think Stockton deliberately engineered it so he'd be in the clear and Sacks would climb the thirteen steps to the gallows."

"It all clicks, Chief," said Della slowly. "But there's one thing that still puzzles me. If the bishop is a real bishop, and not a phoney, what about that stutter?"

Mason grinned. "I thought of that myself," he said. "I asked Mallory about it this morning. He told me all about it: It seems that when he was a boy, he used to stutter. He cured himself of the habit, but every time he got an emotional shock, the stutter would come back to him. When he met the false Janice Brownley on the ship, and realized that she was a fake, and that his promise to Charles Seaton kept him from exposing a serious crime, he was so upset that he began stuttering again. He was still suffering from that shock when he came into my office."