The Case of the Dangerous Dowager (20 page)

Drake said, "I wish to hell I knew why you're so damned anxious to stick up for Belgrade."

"Because," Mason told him, "I make my living by dealing with people. Remember, Paul, if Belgrade was a man of outstanding ability, without any soft spots in his make-up, you couldn't hire him to work for you at eight dollars a day. You have to make allowances for people. Belgrade sold us out. That's admitted. He did it, not because he had anything against us, but because he needed the money. Now then, he's already received that money. He's facing the future. His ability to get work in the future depends a lot on placating you. If you let him feel, in advance, you're going to turn him down cold, he'll turn against you and be bitter. If you let him feel that you're holding his case under advisement, he'll do anything in the world to accommodate you. That means that when he gets in front of the Grand Jury he'll be trying to say what you want him to say – that is, as far as it's in accord with his recollection."

"Well," Drake admitted, "I see your point. But, as far as I'm concerned, he can go to hell. He sold us out."

The men walked to the corner in silence. Mason said, "Well, here are the cars, Paul. I guess I hadn't better stick around this neighborhood."

"Where are you going, Perry?"

"Oh, places," Mason said casually.

Drake stared steadily at him. "You're not going to the Christy Hotel, are you?"

"Why?"

"I have an idea you're figuring on calling on Frank Oxman."

"So what?"

"Don't do it," Drake said earnestly. "That man's dangerous, and you're already in one hell of a hot spot, Perry."

"It won't get any cooler if I stick around in that one spot," Mason told him.

"Well, lay off Frank Oxman. He's dangerous… Oh, by the way, Perry, I think we've found out who's backing him."

Mason, looking up and down the street to make certain there were no radio cars in sight, said, "All right, Paul. Give it to me fast."

"We're keeping a tail on Oxman, just as you instructed," Drake said, "and we find that he telephoned a man by the name of Carter C. Squires, at the Poindexter Hotel. Squires is the head of a gambling ring that dopes race horses, fixes prize fights, and bets on sure things. He spends most of his time in the lobby of the Poindexter and hanging around the bar. Incidentally, he has a police record somewhere, and he's crooked as a corkscrew, but he has money. He finances a lot of crooked schemes and takes a big cut. Oxman talked with Squires on the telephone. He seemed in an awful lather trying to get the call through."

"You couldn't get in on the conversation?" Mason asked.

"No, I couldn't. But Oxman was talking for almost ten minutes."

"That was after he went to the Christy Hotel?"

"Yes."

"Well," Mason said slowly, "I think I'll take a chance on Oxman, at that… I have a little surprise for Oxman… I want to see how he can take it. So far, he's only been dishing it out."

A thin, almost foppishly dressed man in a double breasted gray suit stood on the threshold and surveyed Mason with hostile eyes.

Mason said simply, "I'm coming in, Oxman."

Oxman hesitated a moment, then stepped to one side, and held the door open. After Mason went in, he kicked the door shut and twisted the bolt.

"You left your hotel rather suddenly," Mason remarked affably.

Oxman indicated a chair with a well-manicured hand, on the third finger of which appeared a huge diamond. His hair, neatly waved back from his forehead, reflected glinting highlights from the window. His suit was spotless and freshly pressed, his shoes burnished to a resplendent shine. After Mason had seated himself, Oxman perched on the edge of the bed and propped pillows between his back and the wall. After a moment he said, "I wanted to dodge newspaper reporters."

"Any chance you wanted to dodge the police?" Mason asked.

A slight smile flirted about the corners of Oxman's mouth. "No," he said, "I'm not dodging the police."

Mason, staring steadily at him, said, "I'm Perry Mason, the lawyer."

"Yes, I knew who you were," Oxman said tonelessly. "You left your apartment rather suddenly, didn't you, Mason?"

Mason grinned. "Yes," he said, "I had business to attend to."

"Did you," Oxman inquired, "know the police were looking for you?"

Mason raised his eyebrows. "For me?"

"Yes."

"On what charge?"

"Murder," Oxman said. "Being an accessory after the fact is, I believe, the specific charge."

"Well," Mason told him, "it's fortunate I found you, then."

"Go on," Oxman told him, "spring it."

"I see by the paper," Mason said, "that you bought some IOU's from Grieb."

"What if I did?"

"And paid cash for them."

"Yes?"

"Cash which was found in the left-hand drawer of Grieb's desk."

"I believe so," Oxman agreed.

Mason slowly and impressively took from his pocket the three IOU's which Sylvia Oxman had signed that morning in the hotel. "Take a look at these, Oxman," he said.

Oxman moved forward on the bed. Mason, crossing his legs, held three IOU's pressed tightly against his leg so that Oxman could see the three signatures.

"So what?" Oxman asked.

"If these," Mason suggested, "are the original IOU's, where does that leave you, Oxman?"

Oxman yawned, patted his lips with four polite fingers, and said, "Really, Mason, I'd have expected something far more clever from you."

"Has it ever occurred to you," Mason went on, "that if I hold those original IOU's, the ones you have are forgeries?"

"Oh, I don't think Sam Grieb would have sold me forged IOU's."

"We can prove in court that they're forgeries."

Oxman's tongue made clucking noises against the roof of his mouth. "Grieb shouldn't have sold me forgeries," he said. "That wasn't a nice thing for Grieb to have done. Of course, if they are forgeries, which remains to be proven, I can then recover the seventy-five hundred dollars from Grieb's estate. So you see, Mason, I personally have nothing to lose. Until you prove they're forgeries, I can collect on them as genuine. If you can prove they are forgeries, then, on the strength of the proof you've made, I can recover from Grieb's estate."

"So that's the way you figure it, is it?" Mason asked.

Oxman nodded.

"You've thought this all out in advance as an argument to use in case you were confronted with the original IOU's," the lawyer charged.

Oxman gestured contemptuously toward the three IOU's Mason was holding and said, "Keep your shirt on. Those notes don't prove a damn thing, Mason."

"Why not?"

"You're Sylvia's attorney. You've doubtless seen her since my signed statement was released to the papers. She can sign as many IOU's as she wants to. All she needs is a fountain pen. You can get the blanks in any stationery store. Probably you thought you could throw a scare into me by coming in here and flashing those IOU's on me. I'm not that simple. I'm surprised that you thought I was. You know, Mason, you're playing in bigtime stuff now. You're not up against simple boobs you can twist around your fingers with a lot of cheap bluff. Those IOU's you have may have been signed by Sylvia. That doesn't mean the IOU's I have weren't signed by Sylvia. She can sign her name as many times as she wants to."

Mason said, "You can't get away with it, Oxman."

Oxman's laugh was sarcastic. "That's what you think. You're the one who can't get away with it. You're representing Sylvia. Sylvia murdered Grieb."

"Why?" Mason asked.

"To get possession of those IOU's."

"Why didn't she get them then?"

"Because I'd already bought them. Grieb didn't have them."

Mason stretched his legs out in front of him, crossed his ankles, exhaled cigarette smoke, and said, "That's the trouble with you, Oxman. You're not a logical thinker."

"All right," Oxman said, "go ahead and think some logic for me. I'll listen."

Mason said, "Grieb and Duncan were fighting. They wanted to reduce their assets to cash. They saw a chance to collect not only the face value of those IOU's, but a little bonus as well. They gave you to understand you could have them by paying a two-thousand-dollar bonus. You raised ninety-five hundred dollars, went out to the gambling ship to pick up the IOU's. You found your wife aboard and Grieb dead. At first it occurred to you you'd simply step out of the picture, then you figured it might be possible to involve Sylvia, have her convicted of murder, and put her out of the way.

"This morning you read the newspapers and learned that the police had discovered seven thousand five hundred dollars in cash in Grieb's desk. You suddenly saw an opportunity to do a little chiseling. You figured Sylvia had probably recovered and destroyed the original IOU's. You were planning to release a statement that you'd seen Sylvia in the room with Grieb's body. Why not claim that you'd paid the seventy-five hundred dollars for the IOU's? Forging Sylvia's signature wasn't so hard. You had letters and documents bearing her genuine signature. You secured notes and copied or traced her signature on them."

Oxman yawned ostentatiously and said, "You bore me, Mason. I'd really expected a man of your caliber would show more intelligence."

Mason went on doggedly, "When you first saw Sylvia, she was in the room with Grieb's body. Your first impulse was simply to get out, so you slipped back out of the way. Later on, when you realized Sylvia had failed to report the murder, and had also ducked out – but had left fingerprints on the top of Grieb's desk – you saw an opportunity to charge your wife with murder, claim you'd paid seventy-five hundred dollars for the IOU's, turn two thousand dollars back to your associates, together with the forged IOU's, and sit tight.

"If Sylvia had destroyed the original IOU's, she could never admit she'd done so. If someone else had paid cash for the notes, that person would never dare to come forward, because that would make him the last person to have seen Grieb alive. If…"

"All wrong, Mason," Oxman interrupted. "You must have been smoking marihuana."

"Or," Mason went on evenly, "you noticed the original IOU's on the desk when you saw Sylvia in the room, and figured she was going to destroy them. If anything happened, and the originals turned up in the hands of some individual who was willing to admit having paid seventy-five hundred dollars for them – about one chance in a thousand – you could still claim Grieb had blackmailed you by selling you forged promissory notes. There was no one to disprove your story."

Oxman said, "You know, Mason, this is boring me. Let's have a little more entertainment, or else let's call in the police, let them take you into custody, and have this rather tiresome visit over with."

Mason flicked ashes from the end of his cigarette and said, "You see, Oxman, I can prove what I'm saying."

Oxman raised politely incredulous eyebrows.

"A detective shadowed you all day yesterday," Mason said. "We know what time you went aboard the ship. And we know what you did after you boarded it. You went down the corridor once, and only once."

Oxman's face showed surprise. "My God, Mason, do you mean to say you have practiced law as long as you have, and still put confidence in private detectives? Your man, Drake, may be on the square, but the boys he hires are just like any other private dicks. About half of them are crooked as corkscrews."

"These reports check with the facts," Mason said with dogged patience.

Oxman laughed. "What a sap you are, Mason! And you're supposed to be a big-time lawyer! Good Lord, man, I know I was being shadowed. I got a kick out of it. But if my shadow claims he followed me aboard that gambling ship, he's a liar. I purposely stuck around the pier until there was room for only one more in the launch. Then I took that one seat. The man who was shadowing me tried to follow me but couldn't make it."

Mason said, "Another detective was on duty who saw you go down the passageway to the offices. He says you went down only once."

Oxman laughed scornfully. "The only detective you had out there was Belgrade. He wasn't shadowing me. He was covering Sylvia. He doesn't know where I was. What's more, he's sold you out to the newspapers… Good Lord, Mason, what an easy mark you are! Come around some day when I have some time. I'd like to play a little poker with you. You're so damned simple and your bluffs are so obvious, you'd be duck soup for me."

Mason went on patiently, "Then, after you went ashore, my man shadowed you to your hotel."

"Good God, Mason, you surely didn't think that was any news to me, did you?" Oxman asked.

"You knew he was following you," Mason went on steadily, "and threw a scare into him by standing in the door of the hotel and looking ostentatiously behind you."

"Check on that," Oxman agreed easily. "This dick ducked into a doorway and then stuck around outside, watching the hotel. He was afraid to come in."

"But," Mason pointed out, "I'd anticipated all that, and had another man stationed in the lobby, an operative who was ready to pick you up as soon as you came in."

The easy, patronizing smile didn't leave Oxman's features, but, for a moment, the muscles tightened. Then he took a cigar from his pocket, cut off the tip and scraped a match on the sole of his shoe. He took a watch from his pocket and placed it on the bed beside him. "Mason," he said, "if you're just talking – killing time to keep me from calling the police – it isn't going to do you any good. In precisely three minutes I'm going to let the house detective know you're here."

"Now then," Mason said, ignoring the interruption, "we come to the really significant part of the entire transaction. You took particular pains to call the attention of the hotel night clerk to the fact that you were depositing ninety-five hundred dollars in the safe. The way I figure that, Oxman, is that you'd raised ninety-five hundred dollars with which to take up those IOU's. When you found out Grieb had been murdered, you were afraid you might be implicated in the murder, and were particularly anxious to build up an alibi which would show you hadn't accomplished your business with Grieb before he'd been killed.

"Later on, you thought it over, read the morning papers, and decided there was a chance to knock down seventy-five hundred dollars."

Oxman rotated the cigar in the flame of the match, in order to get it burning evenly, shook the match out, and said, "You're a rotten bluffer, Mason."

"I'm not bluffing," the lawyer told him. "I can prove the ninety-five-hundred-dollar business by the night clerk in the hotel. I don't need to rely on my private detectives there."

"Yes," Oxman said, studying the tip of the cigar with thoughtful eyes, but still keeping the faintly scornful smile about the corners of his mouth, "you could do that, all right. What you have overlooked is that you'd have to prove I had only ninety-five hundred dollars when I went aboard that gambling ship. As a matter of fact, I had seventeen thousand dollars. After I paid seventy-five hundred dollars for the IOU's, I had nine thousand five hundred left. I got the IOU's for about half what I expected I'd have to pay."

For a moment the two men smoked in silence. Gradually, the smile on Oxman's lips broadened into a grin. "You see, Mason," he said, "as a lawyer it should have occurred to you, but probably hasn't, that you'd have to prove I had only ninety-five hundred dollars when I went aboard the ship. There's no way on God's green earth you can prove it. As a matter of fact, it isn't so. I had seventeen thousand dollars."

Mason pinched out the end of his cigarette. "You don't understand what I'm getting at, Oxman. I'm not talking now about what I intend to prove in court. When I leave here, I'm going to Carter Squires. I'm going to tell him my story. Squires was financing you in this thing. He knows how much money you took aboard that ship. When he finds out you tried to double-cross him by knocking down seventy-five hundred dollars, leaving him holding the sack, he won't like it. From all I can hear, Squires is a poor man to cross… Well, the three minutes are up, Oxman. Go ahead and telephone the house detective."