The Case of the Lavender Gripsack Read online

  Elsa gulped. So that was how it was!

  “And do you mind,” she asked plaintively, “telling me how you exited out of my office, while I went up­street to get a—a rag to wear in court—after I’d locked you in, at your own request, against book-peddlers—”

  “—and other scum o’ the earth? Not at all.” Now he grinned thin-lippedly and triumphantly. “In fact, ask the three particular questions that undoubtedly are beating about under that red-thatched brainpan of yours, and I’ll give you answers.”

  “You will? Well, by Godfrey, I’ll—I’ll take you up on that. For I’m not even yet over the shock of thinking you bumped yoursel—but skip it. For here you are, umbrella and all. Well—here’s the $64 question—or Question Number 1: To a dead man what ain’t dead. Nor—but here ’tis: How’d you ever scramble together the imagination to write that suicide letter—what this gal, Lord help her, found!”

  He laughed contentedly. “Why, you little ninn—ah—inno­cent, I didn’t even write it on your typewriter—let alone write it. That was the effusion of an out-of-work newspaper man who lives underneath me—to try and sell to his former editor for a newspaper hoax. I fur­nished him a name or so in it—one being that of some idiotic poet my daughter admir—but okay. ’Twas no dice—the hoax—so the chap tossed it away. And–”

  “—and you got it? And found a bee-ootiful chance later to clap a sig on it, and use it on me to scare me into—whew, what a jolt. Well, all right. Question Number II: How in—in billy-be-damned did you know a body’d be lying on the sidewalk, ten floors below that open window of my office, so that when I looked down—my God!” And Elsa shivered.

  “Fate favored me,” he chuckled. “Whatever bunch of gang­sters tossed Spinetti, the slot-machine king, out there, after I went our, did me a favor—of sorts!”

  “Damned near ruined me for the evening—yowsah,” admitted Elsa morosely. “Well, all right. Question Num­ber III: How did you get out of my locked office?”

  “Oh—Elsa!” he chided. “I used one of the skeleton keys on my bunch of such, which I have to utilize now and then in the various properties I—uh—have ac­quired—”

  “—via the first mortgage route, yes,” said Elsa sweetly.

  “And, dear Elsa,” Silas Moffit pointed out unctuously, “now that we’ve played tit for tat—let’s be friends again. What do you say?”

  “All right—I’ll be friends—if, as, and when! In short, Uncle, I’m in a—a stinking spot here tonight. For if I—that is, when I—no, if I lose this case, that assignment you’ve put on record does, you know, technically and legally become a quitclaim. And while I know you’re not remaining here tonight in order to phone Minny Levinstein the second the trial’s over, to slap some re-conveyance of Colby’s Nugget on record, the point is that if you did—I couldn’t build even a doghouse on my own property, let alone ever sell it. And so I’ll be friends, and I’ll forget all our—hrmph—practical jokes, and I’ll even love and respect you as a niece should an uncle—if here and now, with your own fountain pen, you’ll write out a revocation of that quitclaim clause which I can be having put on record downtown while this very trial’s going on.”

  “Oh—Elsa,” he exclaimed petulantly, “I—I told you once tonight that the assignment itself was up with a man in Fort Wayne, Indiana, as security on a—a transaction, and I can’t, therefore, legally amend a sin­gle line in it.”

  “Oh, the hell you can’t,” said Elsa frankly and wearily. “Well, I should have saved my breath, which I need in court tonight to use to try to save the skin of that wretch in there—and thereby hawgtie you from filing any reconveyances. Yes, I need my breath—and all of it!”

  “I’m afraid you do,” he said gelidly; “at least if you have to place your handsome thug at some distance from the crime—at the hour thereof!”

  “What—what the heck do you mean by that?” Elsa demanded. “In fact, who has even said I hoped to place him—but what do you mean, anyway?”

  “Oh—quite nothing,” he said airy-fairily. “Except that, thanks to being permitted by those who—hrmph—have a right to grant such permission, to be a guest here tonight, I’ve just—hrmph—glimpsed your client in there for the first time—sitting cockily in his chair, but plenty white in the gills at that—and he’s the same chap whom I passed last night, in that very block where the Klondike Building is, and only a couple of minutes after the murder hour, barging away with a—a violin case in his hand. In which he was carrying the sledge, no doubt.”

  “You—you—you saw my client near the scene of the killing?”

  “Yes I did! Or his double. Of course I can’t state une­quivocally and out and out that it was he.”

  “You’re—you’re darned tootin’ you can’t! And dare not—lest the defense does something in placing him elsewhere. Well, of all the low—Listen here, Uncle, you’re—you’re kinda helping along the cause of Justice a bit, aren’t you?”

  “I trust so,” he replied benignly, putting his fingertips together. “For Justice must have its helpers, just as well as red-haired criminals must have–”

  “—red-headed girl lawyers to jiggle ’em out of the hot spot? Yeah—right! Uncle Silas, you hypocrite, you—you weren’t within ten miles of that Klondike Building last night—and, even if you were, anybody you saw with a violin case in their hands didn’t even remotely resemb—listen—” said Elsa desperately, “you aren’t going to testify on that tonight, are you?”

  “We-ell, I’ve already told Mr. Vann, in the courtroom yon­der, of my surprising discovery. And he indicates he wishes me as a contributory witness.”

  “Boy—that sure is nice! My client gets caught with the goods, admits the crime, and then has his own presence at the scene thereof confirmed for him. By an old wolf who wants Colby’s Nugget enough to swear fals–”

  “You—you cease that at once!” Silas Moffit demanded, white-faced. “If—if you so much as once again suggest that I withhold important testimony from the State of Illinois, you—you mangy little red-headed rat, I’ll—I’ll report you to Judge Penworth himself, and you’ll be disbarred so goddamned quick that you’ll—”

  The sliding door of the parlor was flung peremptorily aside.

  “Pardon me, folks!”

  It was blue-nose standing in the opening. “All the witnesses but one—a Negress—are here, and she’s just phoned that she was delayed by a collision be­tween a green taxicab she was riding in and a black taxi, but will be here now in two minutes. The Judge is al­ready at his bench. The stenographers are ready, too. And it lacks but five minutes for court to open. So I think, Miss Colby—if you don’t mind—that you, at least, had better get in there and “—and clear the un­clearable?” said Elsa sardonically.

  “We-ell, I wouldn’t put it quite that way, Miss Colby. For—but maybe I’d better introduce myself, since you may be handing me an exhibit or two tonight to ticket. And again”—with a shrug of his shoulders—“maybe not! I’m Fred Mullins—for many years Judge Pen­worth’s court-clerk down­town—and sometime bailiff—but his man and general helper and what-not here in the old house, since he’s been laid up. And so I, of course, will be combination court-clerk and bailiff here tonight. And so, having—er—established that I have some ba­sis anyway on which to comment, I feel that I might say, Miss Colby, that nobody—with the least scintilla of in­telligence—but knows that your client is guilty and—”

  “I get you, Mr. Mullins,” Elsa replied bitterly, taking up the two items of luggage she had originally depos­ited at the side of the doorway. “Speaking not only as an experienced court-clerk and bailiff but as personal man, and therefore confidant, of no less than Hizzoner—my client’s conviction is in the bag? For the D. A.? All right—let’s go, all. To the slaughter!”

  CHAPTER VI

  “Where the Judge Sits, is the Courtroom.” — Blackstone

  A very
good job, so it was admitted by practically every one of the onlookers—but most particularly the Press—had been made in converting the great first-floor drawingroom of the old Penworth mansion into a courtroom.

  Capable, even, of being enlarged further, by the drawing apart of the great sliding doors which cut it off from the parlor proper, it had not at all had to be thus enlarged—so vast was it. Nor had its lighting had to be amplified either by the usual makeshift substitution of a few large electric bulbs for a few small ones, since the great chandelier that hung from the center of the ceiling, every one of its forty one-time gas tips today carrying an electric bulb, but still supporting the identical five hundred glittering crystal pendants which it had sup­ported back in the gay nineties, poured down an avalanche of efficient and generous light. Thus had the old drawing-room been converted into a most practic­able courtroom. For Mullins, so long associated with Judge Penworth—lately as his man and formerly as his court-clerk—had disposed chairs from all over the house—and tables as well—exactly right, so that the room would serve as a place where the affairs of Justice might be expediently served. And the fact that the hands of the huge mahogany-encased grandfather’s clock which stood against the further wall, facing all the persons there except, perhaps, those who were to function, respec­tively, as judge, court-clerk and court-stenographers, stood this moment at 7:59, proved mute­ly that Justice was going to be served here—and that the trial of “John Doe,” for burglary and murder, was within no less than sixty seconds of officially com­mencing.

  Seated in an unusually high throne chair, of Chinese type—and behind a huge, long and very high polished mahogany table with hand-carved edges and legs, standing itself but a few feet in front of the further wall—a table almost as vast and nearly as empty as a plain in Mongolia—sat Hilford Penworth, Judge of the Criminal Court of Cook County as well as titular owner of this mansion, now in his official black gown—though also, to be sure, in a blue bathrobe, as could be gathered from a single open fold of that black gown—his stolid judicial face with its short white goatee as immobile and impressive, in the face of this unusual court trial, as though the trial were being held down­town. But visible, underneath the edge of that high-standing table, were the mute evidences of why this trial was not being held downtown: his gout-ridden right foot, bound tonight with yards and yards of cotton-padded gauze till it resembled a sofa pillow, and lying on a soft air-blown hassock; and, where both his gown and the underlying blue bathrobe had been momentarily flipped aside, unknown to him, his left arthritic knee, itself swathed in yards of bandage giving forth a faint odor of wintergreen.

  None in the room could know, from the mere evi­dences of the two great windows built into the left-most wall, that those windows gazed—even as did the Judge’s own bedroom, two full stories above—out on a drear, black, bleak prairie of uncleared broken bricks, tangled timbers and ghosts of torn-down houses; for drawn tightly tonight, to the very sills, were the aristocratic faded blue shades. And such air as came into the room from the mild October night outside poured in from a huge but high casement of stained glass, operable by a sort of transom-like hand-lever, both lying rearward of a short, low and coarse deal table scheduled to serve as the desk of the official court-clerk—in this case, one Fred Mullins!

  Who stood himself, at the moment, in black alpaca coat, in the one doorway of the room—midway, in fact, in its rightmost wall—studying, with his eyes focused down past his large blue-veined nose, both a checked sheet of foolscap paper and the persons assembled in the room; and once or twice glancing curiously down at an object which, plainly, was destined to be an official exhibit tonight—but which, because of its weight, had been stood, by whoever had delivered it that afternoon, along the wall near that opening, and allowed to remain exactly there: the iron door of an old-fashioned safe, its combination dial, however, gone; its surface—at least in certain lights from the overhanging chandelier—marred by the dents of a huge sledge; its lone bolt visi­ble through the gaping hole provided by the combina­tion dial’s destruction, and that bolt, furthermore, drawn.

  To the right of the long hand-carved mahogany judge’s table—again, that is, as viewed from the point of vantage of the spectators—was exactly what one would find in a regulation courtroom: a capacious armchair—this one of ash, and with leather seat—now empty, but no doubt destined to house tonight, at least for varying brief periods, the State’s witnesses, at least; and it had been placed, moreover, by Mullins, atop a one-foot high—though several feet square—packing box, partly shrouded with a rug, so that the chair looked down, as it were, on the entire rest of the room. And so wide was that room that, even to the right of that witness chair, it had been possible to place a further table back of which, in a stiff-backed hard chair, dressed in black sateen, sat Miss Angeline Swarthmar, one of the best court reporters in the city, capable of taking more testimony, so it was said—and taking it faster—than anybody but one in the profession. And that one—Miss Pauline Swarthmar—dressed so much like her sister that she might have been her twin, sat in a painted and also stiff-backed chair at the same table, but ninety degrees around from her sister, ready to spell the latter off at the first instant that her lightning-like, pot-hook-making hand should become fatigued.

  Down directly in front of the long, broad mahogany table—and “down” for the simple reason that its sur­face was actually lower—was a smaller long table, though had it been by itself alone it would have been called large; it was small only in comparison with the huge table which overshadowed it. It had evidently been brought in from the parlor, where it conceivably had been used as a lounge table. But this table was by no means empty; for it contained—at least on each of its ends—a suggestive array of brief-cases, books and papers.

  At the right end of that slightly lower table, in front of an expensive hand-tooled tan leather brief-case which was liter­ally bursting its sides, and in a red-velvet seated gilt-legged chair, sat Louis Vann, District Attor­ney of Cook County, in business-like grey suit, his keen, sharp face, which neither belied nor emphasized his age of forty years, satisfiedly contemplating certain papers he was even now shuffling about; while at his feet under his end of the table lay three significant parcels, one showing, where it had partly broken through the manila wrapping-paper covering it, that it was a glassed-in cabinet wall clock; another consisting of just an ordinary cardboard suit-box, loosely tied together; and the third a square leather case of just about the size to contain what was evidently the most important exhibit that could be offered in this trial: the skull found in the defendant’s pos­session that day on Adams and Dearborn Streets. At Vann’s left elbow, on an ordinary white enameled kitchen chair, sat Leo Kilgallon, the District Attorney’s youthful and very effi­cient helper, in blue serge suit, matching, at least in its darkness, his black bow-tie and his jet black eyes.

  In a gargantuan leather arm-chair at the left end of that lower table—where, indeed, she looked like a dot over an i—sat Elsa, attorney for the defense, an unmistakably worried expression on her small oval face, and an imitation-leather brief-case in front of her, its emaciation around the edges and the double-squarish bulge in its thin uppermost side indicat­ing that it held, at best, no more than a couple of law books for possible citing of legal references; and, at her petite little feet, a clumsy gripsack—or, as some might term it, carpet-bag—made of brilliant lavender carpeting; a hideous and an archaic thing, to say the least, but obviously required by the defense attorney to fetch to this trial something—something which might, perhaps, have been very heavy—but which, whether or no, at least in a couple of places in the carpeting comprising the sides of the bag, caused bulges which hardly masked sharply angular projections on that something which was within! And, deshrouded now of her borrowed raincoat, Elsa herself was tonight a symphony of color in her chic Paris-like brown silk gown trimmed at neck and hem, as well as at the cuffs of its quaint semi-puff short sleeves, with cunn
ingly blue-dyed fur which, in its unusual jade-like tint, exactly brought out some latent hidden green that lay in the blue of her eyes. Though, unfortunately, nothing she wore—much less the brilliant chandelier lighting the entire room—made her freckles less prom­inent!

  The courtroom-converted drawing-room of the Penworth mansion was not minus, either, someone to try—for he was here—brought here, moreover, secretly and in a snug, armored, detective-bureau patrol wagon; and he sat even now in a cold-looking chair with wide flat handles—just back of Elsa, where she could, when or if necessary, turn and speak to him. His position, therefore, was directly in front of where the court-clerk himself would be sitting. He wore a powerful inch-thick steel cuff on his right wrist, which cuff was attached by six feet of stout chain to a like cuff on the wrist of a burly blue-coated policeman with monstrous protruding underjaw, red face and pitiless blue eyes, who sat on a low tabourette in front of the prisoner, and therefore likewise at Elsa’s back.

  And, seated in a great miscellany of chairs, drawn up in four rows at the opposite end of the huge room, one row behind the other, were the witnesses and spec­tators of this strange legal trial. Thirty-four in number altogether! Not all witnesses, no—for the reason that there were at least four alone who were marked on Mullins’ admission sheet as possessing a palpable right to be there, based on other considerations than that they were there to give possible testimony—two, indeed, for no other reason than that they had been invited to come, and had, moreover, been brought, by one who was himself perhaps the most important of all the witnesses there: Wah Lung, father of the youth whose kidnaping and murder years ago had, in a sense, brought about this very trial tonight, years later. A third was set down as “uncle of defense attorney, okay, H. P.”; while a fourth, a black-bearded Russian, was the father of a very small boy, too young to go about the city himself, but who was, nevertheless, scheduled to give one of the important evidential links in this case. And there were even more spectators yet—seven in number, to be exact—who had identified themselves at the front door by certain leather-encased cards on their persons—and constituting, the entire seven, no less than the Press.