The Case of the Dangerous Dowager (5 page)

Drake pushed his fingers down inside his collar, ran them around the neckband of his shirt, and said, "Let's beat it. If we're going to be pinched, I sure as hell don't want to go to jail in this outfit."

"May I ask you some first?" she inquired.

He nodded.

"You saw Grieb?"

"Yes."

"Get anywhere?"

Mason shook his head and said, "Not yet. The breaks went against me."

She eyed him in shrewd appraisal. "I suppose you don't go in much for alibis and explanations."

Mason shook his head and was silent.

"Do you want to tell me about it?"

"No."

"Well, then, what's the next move?" she asked.

Mason said, "I'm going to try him again – this time from another angle. Before I do, I want to know more of what I'm up against."

She opened her purse, took out her cigar case and selected a cigar. While she was cutting off the end, Mason scratched a match and held it across the desk to her. She regarded him with twinkling eyes through the first white puffs of cigar smoke and said, "All right, go ahead. Ask your questions."

"What do you know about Grieb?"

"Nothing much. Just what my granddaughter tells me. He's hard and ruthless. I warned you he wouldn't be easy."

"Know anything about Duncan?"

"Sylvia says he doesn't count. He's sort of a yes-man."

"I think your granddaughter is fooled," Mason said.

"I wouldn't doubt it. She's too young to know much about men of that type. She can size up the sheiks all right, tell just about when they're going to start getting ambitious and what their line's going to be, but she can't size up gamblers."

"Her husband wants to get a divorce?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Why do men usually want to get divorces?"

Mason shook his head impatiently and said, "You'll have to play fair with me, Mrs. Benson. What's behind all this?"

She smoked in silence for a few seconds and said, "When my granddaughter is twenty-six, which'll be next year, she gets one-half of a trust fund, and her daughter, Virginia, who's six, gets the other half, unless a judge should decide Sylvia isn't a fit person to have the custody of Virginia. In that case, Virginia gets all of it."

"And with a situation like that brewing," Mason said incredulously, "she's given IOU's to a couple of gamblers?"

Matilda Benson nodded. "Sylvia's always done pretty much as she pleased. That's why the property was left in trust and not given to her outright."

"So her husband's trying to get some evidence which'll give him a divorce and cause Sylvia to lose her share of the trust funds?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"So his daughter will have twice as much money, and so he can have the handling of that money. If he ever finds out about those IOU's, he'll get them and use them to show Sylvia can't be trusted with money. He has other evidence, too, but, right now, he wants to show she can't be trusted with money. You'll have to work fast. I want those IOU's before Sam Grieb finds out how important they are."

Mason said slowly, "I think Grieb already knows."

"Then we're licked before we start."

"No, we're not licked, but I begin to see why you wanted a lawyer. How much is the trust fund?"

"Half a million in all. If Frank Oxman ever gets the custody of Virginia and gets his hands on the money it'll be like signing the kid's death warrant."

"Surely not that bad," Mason said.

"That man's like a rattlesnake."

"He'd be under the control and supervision of the courts," Mason pointed out.

She laughed mirthlessly. "You don't know Frank Oxman. Sylvia isn't any match for him. As long as I'm here I'll fight him, but I'm almost seventy. I'm not going to be here forever."

"But look here," Mason said, "a court wouldn't deprive Sylvia of the custody of her child simply because she'd been gambling."

"There are other things," Matilda Benson said grimly.

"How about Frank Oxman; does he have any money?"

"He has a little to gamble with."

"What sort of gambling?"

"The stock market mostly. That's considered respectable. Sylvia plays roulette, and that's considered immoral. People make me sick. They're hypocrites."

"What I'm trying to find out," Mason said, "is how Oxman is going to get the money to take up those IOU's."

"Don't worry, he'll raise that all right."

"How?"

"There's a ring that will put up money for things like that," she said. "Occasionally Frank is able to fix a prize fight or a horse race or something of that sort. He can always raise the necessary money to make a killing then."

"Sylvia will pay off those IOU's if she gets that money from the trust fund?"

"Of course."

"No matter who has the IOU's?"

Matilda Benson nodded.

"It would help a lot," Mason said slowly, "if she wouldn't."

"What do you mean?"

"If Frank Oxman is going to buy those IOU's he'd have to offer cash for them. He'd have to offer the amount of the notes plus a bonus. If he's borrowing the money, he'd have to put up the IOU's as collateral. If the people who were loaning the money thought the collateral wasn't good, they'd refuse to put up the money."

"No," she said slowly, "that won't work. Sylvia would never go back on her word."

Mason said, "I have an idea. I don't know how good it is, but I think it may work. From what I saw last night, I think there's friction between Grieb and Duncan. I have an idea that friction may be sufficiently intensified to throw them into a court of equity. A court wouldn't consider the gambling business an equitable asset. But there's quite a lot of money invested in furniture and fixtures, and the partnership must have that gambling ship under lease. Now, if I could start the pair fighting, and one of the partners should drag the other into court and have a receiver appointed to wind up the partnership business, they couldn't transfer those notes. And if I pointed out to a federal court that the notes had been given to secure a gambling debt, it would probably refuse to consider them as assets."

Matilda Benson leaned forward. "Listen," she said, "I don't want to be held up by a couple of crooked gamblers. But if you can pull something like this, the sky's the limit so far as expenses are concerned."

"Which brings us," Mason said casually, "to the question of why you're so anxious to get those IOU's. If you make Sylvia a present of them, the effect is just the same as though you'd given her the money to go and pay them off. And that wouldn't take any premium. Therefore…"

Della Street gently opened the door from the outer office and said in a low voice, "Charles Duncan is in the outer office, Chief. He says he wants to see you personally and that it's important."

Matilda Benson's gray eyes stared significantly at the lawyer. "That means," she said, "they've already approached Oxman, and Duncan is going to play one bidder against the other."

Mason shook his head, his forehead furrowed into a puzzled frown. "I don't think so," he told her. "I have detectives on Oxman, Duncan and Grieb. This certainly isn't a matter they'd discuss over the telephone, and if there'd been a personal meeting I'd have known of it."

"Then what does he want to see you about?"

Mason said, "The best way to find out is by talking with him." She nodded. He turned to his secretary and said, "Della, take Mrs. Benson into the law library. Tell Mr. Duncan to come in… Does Duncan know you, Mrs. Benson?"

"No, he never saw me in his life."

"All right, you wait in the law library. I think Duncan is going to make some proposition. It may prove interesting."

Della Street said, "This way, please," escorted Matilda Benson into the law library, and then brought Charlie Duncan into Mason's private office.

Duncan's face was twisted into his customary cordial grin, prominently displaying the burnished gold teeth in his upper jaw, "No hard feelings because of last night?" he asked.

"No hard feelings," Mason said.

"You played a pretty smart game," Duncan went on. "If it hadn't been that the breaks went against you, you'd have had us licked."

Mason said nothing.

Duncan said, "Oh, well, we can't always win, you know."

Mason indicated a chair and said, "Sit down."

Duncan took a cigar case from his pocket and extended it to Mason.

"No," Mason told him, "I only smoke cigarettes."

Duncan sniffed and then indicated Matilda Benson's leather cigar case which she had left on the desk.

"Looks like some client must have left a cigar case here, then."

Mason frowned and said, "My law clerk." He pressed a button which summoned Della Street, handed her the leather cigar case and said, "Take this out to Jackson and tell him he left his cigars in here."

Della Street nodded, a twinkle showing in her eyes. "Yes," she said demurely, "Jackson will be missing his cigars."

She took the cigar case and left the room. Duncan grinned and said, "So the grandmother's your client, eh?"

Mason raised his eyebrows. Duncan laughed and said, "Don't think we're quite such damn fools as you made us seem last night, Mason. Naturally we tried to figure out how you fitted into the picture. We didn't think you were representing Oxman, or you wouldn't have tried to run a ringer on us. You certainly weren't representing Sylvia. But Sylvia has a grandmother who smokes cigars. That was a woman's cigar case."

"Are you asking me or telling me?" Mason asked.

"I'm telling you."

"Nice of you," the lawyer remarked, yawning. "And that's all you wanted to see me about?"

"No."

"What did you want to see me about?"

"About those IOU's."

"What about them?"

Duncan crossed his knees, said, "Now listen, Mr. Mason, I want you to get me straight. I like the way you played the game last night. Checking back on the conversation you had with Sam, we found we couldn't pin anything on you. You never claimed the man with you was Frank Oxman. You had him try to cash a check, and Sam did all the leading from there on. And the damn fool led with his chin. We thought we might have you on that check business because Sam remembered the name of the bank. But we did a little snooping around and found you'd plugged up that loophole. If we could have found a weak point in your play, we'd have been mean about it. But we couldn't find any. It was a slick piece of work."

"And you dropped in to tell me that?" Mason asked.

Duncan shook his head and said, "I dropped in to tell you how you could get those IOU's."

"How?"

"I'd want you to do something for me. You're smart. I need a smart lawyer."

Mason stared steadily at the gambler and said, "Get me straight on this, Duncan: I'm interested in those IOU's. I'm not interested for myself, but for a client. Now, I don't know what you have in mind, but I don't want you to tell me anything you wouldn't want repeated to my client. In other words, you and I are dealing at arm's length. If you tell me anything, I'm not going to keep the conversation confidential. If I can capitalize on what you tell me, I'm going to do it. A lawyer can't serve two masters.

"Now then, with that understanding, if you want to talk about those IOU's, go ahead. I'd advise you not to."

Duncan's gold teeth flashed into prominence. "Well," he said, waving his cigar in a little gesture, "I can't say you didn't warn me."

Mason sat silent.

"Listen," Duncan went on, "I've been a gambler all my life. I'm going to take a chance on you. I have a proposition I think will look good to you."

Mason said slowly, "I'm going to tell you once more, Duncan. I'm not in this business for my health. Whenever I do something it's because some client is paying me money to do it. That means I've already been employed by some client whose interests are adverse to yours. If you don't tell me anything, you won't have anything to regret later on."

"Spoken like a gentleman," Duncan said.

"No," Mason corrected, "spoken like a lawyer."

"Okay," Duncan said, "you've told me – not only once, but twice. If I put my head in a noose it's my own funeral. Is that it?"

"That's it," Mason said.

"All right, now suppose you listen to me for a while. I need a smart lawyer. I need you. You've been employed to get those IOU's. That's the limit of your interest in my affairs, at present. All right, I'll see that you get the IOU's. I'll give them to you. In return, I want you to do something for me.

"I want to get rid of Sam. He's hard to get along with. He thinks he's the whole show. I don't like it. Now then, is it true that when a partnership is organized for an unspecified term, either partner can dissolve the partnership at any time he wants to?"

Mason said, "Supposing that's the law, then what?"

"I want to dissolve that partnership."

"You don't need a smart lawyer to do that," Mason pointed out.