I Dreamed I Married Perry Mason (2 page)

F
or most people the world over, Beverly Hills is a mythic place, a big-ticket Shangri-La chockablock with diamond-dripping trophy wives and buxom starlets cruising in convertibles on perennially sun-kissed days. For me, Beverly Hills meant only two things: parking hell and Raymond Burr.

Every Friday, like clockwork, I headed to the Museum of Television and Radio on Beverly Drive to watch at least four back-to-back episodes of
Perry Mason
. It was the ultimate in decadence—watching TV and calling it work—especially since I usually stopped at the Candy Baron across the street first to load up on Swedish fish and cinnamon bears. But if I didn't get there by eleven
A.M.
, especially during the Christmas rush (which in Beverly Hills begins in August), I'd be punished by having to circle the block for hours.

My horoscope said that today was a good day to travel. Sure enough, I cruised down Santa Monica Boulevard heading west without hitting a single red light. I turned left onto Beverly and directly into the city-operated lot equidistant from the candy store and the museum. It was a hot, hazy
day and by midmorning the air was already thick with the intermingled scents of expensive perfume and iced blended coffee. Everyone seemed to be carrying one of these ostensibly low-fat confections—tourists in search of Rodeo Drive; secretaries on break; affluent young moms, their babies immobilized in strollers. With its lunar module–esque bubble lid (to accommodate the standard-issue squirt of whipped cream), the twelve-ounce to-go cup was a veritable civic icon.

I got one. It seemed unpatriotic not to.

Slurping determinedly, I popped in and out of the candy store, then made my way to the museum, a glass-fronted monstrosity chronically streaked with grime. Catching sight of my reflection, I wondered if I passed for a local. Poised on top of my long dark hair, which I currently wore in a sort of Jaclyn Smith homage, was my favorite pair of Jackie O sunglasses, which in and of itself exemplified my fashion schizophrenia. From the neck down, things became yet more complicated. I was wearing a flowing, circa 1974 Ossie Clark knockoff that, according to Annie, totally rocked. Better yet, it was unwrinkleable. And high-heeled Prada Mary Janes that didn't hurt. But, alas, no Hermès bag. Even on eBay, those babies went for triple my mortgage payment, plus some. Champagne taste and a beer pocketbook, as my mother used to say.

I sidestepped the gift shop, stuffed to the rafters with things I
could
afford but didn't want (
I Love Lucy
lunchboxes and
Three Stooges
backpacks, for example), and went upstairs to get my tapes.

On the menu for today were “The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink,” “The Case of the Howling Dog,” “The Case
of the Twice-Told Twist,” and “The Case of the Dangerous Dowager,” the latter of which—had Gardner's publisher had his way—would have been titled “The Case of the Pig-headed Widow,” which tells you about how much publishers know. Writing as much as he did, Gardner developed a standard meter for titles: la
la
la la
la
la la
la.
The last word had to be short and naturally emphasized, unless it was a two-syllable word, in which case the first syllable was customarily slurred over, as in “brunette.” Gardner took a lot of heat for referring to himself as a “one-man fiction factory,” but I admired the economy of it all. When everything is systematized, there is no wasted energy. As the reluctant champion of the chicken-with-her-head-cut-off approach to life, I realized I could learn a thing or two from this guy.

There were twenty-four TV-watching cubicles in the main room, and they were almost always empty. How depressing it must be to work here, kind of like being alone in a movie theater. Today there was a man in a Jackson Five T-shirt two seats over from my favorite cubicle, absorbed in the
Apollo 11
moon landing, and an old lady next to him watching what I guessed was an early episode of
Dragnet
. Everybody loves a mystery.

My daughter had become one, overnight. This was distressing. Ah, well. She'd called from Lael's at the crack of dawn to tell me I could come over later in the afternoon, but only if I swore not to talk, just to listen. Listening is not my best event. But I'd give it a shot. Right now, though, I had to get to work.

I laid out my pens and pencils in neat little rows. I sorted and resorted my note cards. I was in the middle of an exquisite Post-it note collage when I realized just how nervous I
was about this project. It was August, the manuscript was due in three months, and it was full of loose ends.

I had the literary analysis all tied up, having sat for years at the feet of the master—my ex, the world's second-most-renowned James Fenimore Cooper scholar. What a dubious honor, not that he'd see it that way. The great so often go unrecognized in their own time. Anyway, I will grudgingly admit that he taught me how to deconstruct a text. And, yes, our endless fights about feminist theory were inspirational. They made me realize I had to dump the misogynist bastard, for one thing. Also, that what had been left out of the Erle Stanley Gardner literature was any discussion of the centrality of women in his books.

After reading a dozen or so, I had become convinced that with the Perry Mason series Gardner had pioneered a new kind of soft-boiled pulp written specifically for a female audience. Which is to say the prurient appeal of all those sulky girls, leggy vixens, and glamorous widows throwing themselves at Perry Mason was merely a ruse. In fact, those dames in distress almost always served to undermine his mastery, in subtle and interesting ways.

No, what was hard-going was not analyzing the work. Nor was it figuring out Mason's place along the continuum of amateur gumshoes, cops, and spies skulking their way across the American mystery landscape. That'd been my turf since I'd turned eleven and discovered Nancy Drew. Nope, what was causing all the trouble was Gardner himself.

Descended from Colonial New Englanders, his parents were members of the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution. When he was a boy of ten, the family moved out West and he commenced a long and distinguished career as a
troublemaker. Erle was suspended from high school; got involved in prizefighting at a time it constituted a felony in California; was shipped off to law school in Indiana and took part in a bottle-smashing incident in the dorm; ducked the cops trying to serve the warrant; took a train to Chicago, then Oregon, then California; apprenticed himself to an Oxnard lawyer who needed help with his two-bit cases; fleeced the D.A. with his legendary ingenuity; and wound up the lawyer of choice in Ventura County, “of all classes except the upper and middle classes,” as he once so winningly put it. To make some extra money, he started writing for the pulps. The rest, as they say, is history.

It was thrilling stuff, admittedly, but the bad-boy antics took you only so far. I needed to humanize him, and the key, I had finally decided, lay not in Gardner's writing per se, but in the Court of Last Resort.

Let me explain. With the success of Perry Mason, Gardner had become a magnet for hopeless cases. The letters poured in from prisons nationwide. And every last one of Gardner's pen pals claimed to be innocent: framed by an ex-lover, tripped up by circumstantial evidence, victimized by a prison grapevine. In every single case, the jury had been biased, the D.A. up for reelection, the judge senile, whatever. Gardner was a sympathetic ear, having firsthand experience with the fallibility of the legal system and a weakness for the underdog.

And so, in 1948, he conceived of the Court of Last Resort. Its sole purpose was to persuade the authorities to reopen criminal cases in which men and women had been wrongly convicted of capital offenses. Gardner put together a panel of volunteer experts in various aspects of criminology who
reexamined case files, performed polygraphs, and interviewed witnesses, looking for flaws in the evidence. Over the period of a decade or so, he wrote seventy-five articles for
Argosy
magazine in which he described the process and put his findings before the public, whom he deemed the ultimate Court of Last Resort.

In April I had taken a research trip to the University of Texas in Austin, where the Erle Stanley Gardner archive is maintained (unbelievably, nobody in California thought to ask until it was too late). The archive was a beautiful thing to behold. Gardner was a stickler about correspondence and kept every last shred, which was not a problem given that his convoy of secretaries was made up of legendary organizational fiends.

For an entire week I focused on the Court of Last Resort. I had a jolly old time going through the “heartbreak files,” Gardner's term for each prisoner's correspondence, trial transcripts, parole board reports, and so on, being extra careful not to spill the coffee I smuggled daily into the fourth-floor library. They made good coffee out there in Texas. Nice and strong. As for the barbecue, no thank you. Too sweet. North Carolina barbecue, now that's the real deal.

Anyway, it wasn't working. The whole thing. I wasn't getting much more of a sense of Erle Stanley Gardner. Not until that magic moment when I stumbled across a dog-eared letter from 1958, handwritten on lined paper. It caught my eye because it had been misfiled, and Gardner's team of obsessive-compulsives just didn't make those kinds of mistakes. Then I read it. It had been written by a man recently convicted of killing his wife. And I read it again.

I knew Gardner had read the letter because he'd appended a note that read, “L.P.: follow up. Rings a bell/ESG.” But there was nothing further in the files. I could find no record of the case ever having been written up in
Argosy
. And Gardner had left the Court of Last Resort not long after the letter
had been received. Had he ever investigated? Why had this case rung a bell? Had the real murderer ever been found?

Maybe it was the writer's humility. Maybe it was his willingness to suffer to protect someone else, the unnamed person who could have provided his alibi. So many of the other letters had been so hostile. Joseph Albacco seemed more befuddled than brutal, and convinced, somehow, that Erle Stanley Gardner, a perfect stranger, could straighten everything out. What touched me was his faith. He trusted Gardner enough to place his life in the man's hands.

And then, sitting at that old oak desk in Austin, after a long slug of that good Texas coffee, I had a great idea. When I got back home and laid it on her, Lael thought it was insane, but we always thought each other's great ideas were insane (I tried like the dickens, for example, to dissuade her from helping the father of her youngest child, baby August, with his doomed feng shui business. No one shed tears for him when he hightailed it back to Dusseldorf, except maybe the IRS).

Anyway, I decided on that day that I was going to find Joseph Albacco. Yes, I know it would've made more sense to try to track down one of the people Gardner had actually written about in
Argosy,
someone he'd actually gotten out of jail. That person would be guaranteed to have stories, great ones. It would have been the logical way to proceed. But sometimes you have to go with your gut. Joseph Albacco's letter had spoken to me. And if he was still alive, I wanted to meet him. If Joseph Albacco couldn't put a face on Erle Stanley Gardner, I had a feeling no one could.

Weeks, then months of wrangling with the good people at the California Department of Corrections ensued. Inter
estingly, not one of them much liked my great idea. Yes, the prisoner in question was still in their custody. But as I was neither a lawyer nor a family member, it seemed that I had no business visiting him or anyone else at any of their facilities. True enough, if you wanted to get technical about it. Three weeks ago, I managed to get the warden on the phone.

“Your name, how do you pronounce it exactly?” he asked.

“Like the opera singer.”

“I'm a bowling sort of guy myself.”

“Ca-Ru-So, as in Kaboom, Rude, So What,” I said, sighing. “It's Italian.”

“I'm Polish,” he volunteered. “Tam-Row-Ski, as in Tam O'Shanter, rowdy, the winter sport.”

I thought I might be getting somewhere when he said he had a nephew living in West Hollywood.

“How fabulous!” I chirped. “Maybe I even know him! West Hollywood's such a friendly place, and what a Halloween parade, my goodness!”

He harrumphed. It seemed said nephew's “lifestyle” had broken the kid's mother's heart.

I was fresh out of ideas when someway, somehow, the chaplain got wind of our conversation and interceded on my behalf, arranging everything with the warden. The chaplain, it seemed, had come to know Joseph Albacco quite well over the years, and had something important to say to me himself. We agreed to talk right after my meeting with Albacco.