The Case of the Lavender Gripsack Read online

  “Well, now, Doe,” he said, seemingly a bit bewildered, “before commenting upon the basic essentials and elements of your somewhat amazing story—which, of course, I am going to do—I want to render a few purely analytic com­ments about—not against, nor for—its precise status as an alibi. A story which, running only up to midnight last night, and ending only in Minneapolis, has not yet—let me warn you—ex­plained why you ever replied to Archbishop Pell as you did today, and in the way that you did. And which, no doubt, you’ll explain, I take it?” The defendant was nodding emphat­ic affirmation. “And so—but first, Doe, before rend­ering those analytic comments on your story, I note that that story—though otherwise one thousand per cent explicit—doesn’t even yet tell us your right name. How about that?”

  “My right name,” retorted the defendant stiffly, “does not matter in this problem. I am a thief. I have admitted it. But the circumstances of my past life—outside, that is, of one to which I alluded in my story—who I really am—what educa­tion I may have had—who my people were—so forth and so on—do not matter in the point at issue. Nor does it even matter, therein, that I am a thief. I am on trial here tonight for a specific crime. And I have a lawyer—bless her well-mean­ing little heart!—who is representing me. And so as to my right name—well, since I’ve revealed my profession, at least as of some years past, the name remains just ‘Doe’—for there is no use in unnecessarily disgracing such of my relatives as are living.”

  “Quite true,” agreed Penworth judicially. “For after all—your movements and whereabouts only as of last night—plus your explanation of that incident occurring today on Adams and Dearborn Streets—have any significance with respect to this specific trial. And so again, Doe, about this amazing story you’ve told. And I say amazing, Doe, simply because of the stupendous numerical discrepancy between the characters in it who are ‘real—real,’ that is, you understand, in a legal sense, i.e. persons who are named as to name and where­abouts; and who are, moreover, reachable and identifiable—and persons who are not of this category. For instance, Doe, your story—according to my own individual method for analyzing such things, and allowing some latitude in calling certain salient business firms—also certain race-horses—even in one case a fraternity house—‘characters’—contains, Doe, 135 different characters. A fact! Did you realize that?”

  “I can’t say that I did, Your Honor,” replied the defendant naïvely, “nor that, since participating in that ‘story’ myself, I stopped to mathematically analyze it. Certainly not, Your Honor, as it appears you have.”

  “Well, I most certainly have,” declared Penworth, “due to listening for many years to stories—wild and true—told in witness chairs. And have evolved my own analytical Short­hand therefor!”

  He paused a second, half undecidedly, then bent his atten­tion to his sheets and went on speaking. “But before I pro­ceed, Doe—as proceed I must and proceed I will—to rigor­ously boil down your story to its essential substance which possesses the actual power to clear you—if that turns out to be the case—I would like to point out how egregiously much of it is of absolutely no legal value for so doing. Oh yes, a fact.” Penworth’s gaze moved from one set of figures to another. “For your story, Doe, while in a rough sense a ‘135-person alibi,’ is really not even remotely such. No, not at all! For 15 of those 135 ‘persons’ are, unfortunately, race-horses, who could not testify to anything—even were they willing! Again, 36 are persons merely named in news stories, or news pic­tures, referred to, and involved in your story. They could tes­tify, at best, to nothing but their own relations to the par­ticular news story you have named them in connec­tion with. In like manner, 6 are defendants and plaintiffs in law cases cited by you, and presumably cited to you by oth­ers. And—now wait—wait! Here, good heavens, are 5, of actual minus-zero value, that I almost overlooked—for they are nothing but fiction characters in a short story related to you by another character to decide an issue—so out they go automatically. And now wait—here are 2 persons toward which your actions threatened to catapult you—except that, alas, you never got to them—having changed your plans—hence they are com­pletely out as witnesses; while here, in turn, are 29—yes, 29, Doe!—unknown to you entirely, and set forth only as you presumably heard of them—under pseudonyms used by one or another person in your story. Such as ‘Cokey’—‘Big Shoes’—‘the Killer’—and particu­larly the ‘one-eyed blond gigolo,’ ‘Blinky,’ whose skull pre­sumably forms tonight the corpus delicti in this case. For—now wait. Here is 1 person, ‘Two-gun Polack Eddy,’ real existent—but, alas, wanted by the police—and unfindable. Unreal, therefore, as a witness presumably able to confirm certain claims. While here—and this one is a business firm, to be sure—the San Francisco bookmaking establishment—but illicit, and not locatable.” Penworth was silent, studying his sheets. “And here are 24—24, altogether—persons who, though connected vitally with your story and your facts, are dead—dead Doe!—therefore zero as to possibility of con­firming anything. And—”

  He looked up, but raised a hand. “And thus, Doe,” he finished, “the 135 ‘persons’ of your story sift down to but six who are findable, identifiable, capable of giving testimony of any sort in connection with it. Since—no, wait. For you hav­en’t even got six witnesses, Doe, of value to you personally. Since, of these six witnesses, your story presents—as having been in direct contact with yourself, and during these alibi hours—only two persons. Two persons, Doe—who support your presence in the story you told. And—but did you realize that fact?”

  “I—”

  “Oh, you must have. For you’re not a numbskull, nor—but exactly why, Doe, did you tell your own attorney—whether you believed in her, or whether you didn’t believe in her—that you had no witnesses at all!”

  “I didn’t tell her that, Your Honor. I told her that I had no ‘reputable witnesses.’ For on thinking over the six persons—six, as it now appears the number is who can even support facts—or two who can sustain my alibi itself—I regarded none of them as what you call—well—the elite of humanity.”

  “I see. Well, the two—two, and not six by any means—the two witnesses which apparently step forth from your story as the ones who constitute your alibi are, let me tell you, far far more reputable than many who have, in trials I’ve held, cleared defendants completely. And—but in view of the fact that you had, not just one, but—as it appears—two alibi wit­nesses, why didn’t you inform the District Attorney himself when he interviewed you, that you had those witnesses—give him their names—and thus have avoided this entire trial by his being unwilling to indict you when you plainly were able to prove you were elsewhere at the time of the crime?”

  “Why, Your Honor? Why, because, of course, I knew he’d rush some of his minions up there to Minneapolis, and have my few—but valuable—witnesses kidnapped. And—”

  “I object!” broke out Vann angrily. “That statement, Your Honor, is an insult to the District Attorney’s office.”

  “Oh—yeah?” said the defendant, turning to Vann. “Well I wouldn’t put it past any D.A. in America to bump off a witness who might prevent him from winning a trial. And how do you like that, Mr. D.A.? After all, you know, I’m not on trial here for insulting you. And I—”

  “No, by God, you’re not, but you’re on tri—”

  “Please!” put in Penworth irritably. “No personalities—please—this is a courtroom, even if it is a converted drawing-room.” He turned to the defendant. “Isn’t that a rather lurid and fantastic idea—that the District Attorney would stoop to kidnap your witnesses? Kidnappers—and members of kid­nap­ping cliques—are not found in the District Attorney’s office. They are found in the underw—”

  But now Elsa stood up. “If I may beg to interrupt the Court,” she said, “I would like to correct that statement. My client has all the right in the world to believe what he does about such things! I ha
ve read up—and no later than early this evening, either—on that old Wah Lee kidnapping case—which of course took place when I was a child—and when Mr. Vann himself over there was only a—a legal stripling. And that gang had ramifications which reached to and into the highest circles. It—it had ‘finger men’ who could tip it off to whom and when and where they could grab their prey. For the Wah Lee kidnapping wasn’t apparently the only kid­napping job they—they pulled. Indeed, the District Attorney tonight has practically re-stated the very theory that there was just such a high-up ‘finger man’ in the Wah Lee case. But whether or no, it seems to have been a practical certainty that that gang had someone in high police circles or something—someone who was able to tip them off continually to certain police activities. Moreover, Your Honor, one of the most dangerous men in that gang was one ‘Venus Baldy,’ who—who had a nude Venus tattooed on his bald scalp, who had escaped from an Australian penitentiary just before his own execution, and was known—because of some of his words having been picked up on a telephone conversation—to have struck Chica­go and—and joined up with that Parson Gang. And that man, Your Honor, whose picture has never been reproduced any­where in the world simply because the only photograph that there was of him—the official prison photo—was destroyed by an old—an old prison-clerk ‘lag’—who wanted to—to aid his ‘crushout’—well, the kind of man he was is evident by the fact that he had shot a witness to death who, himself alone, would have gotten ‘Venus Baldy’ a con­viction in a certain Australian murder and kidnapping. The—the—the—the—”

  “The Fordyce Case—Melbourne,” put in Vann dryly. “I see you’ve at least been a faithful reader, child, of the true crime-story magazines.” Elsa glared at her opponent. “Yes—the Fordyce Case,” she echoed. But toward Penworth only. “And so, Your Honor, my client’s suppositions about kid­napping in the District Attorney’s office are not so extremely fantastic after all.”

  “Well,” said the Judge dryly, “they very much are—when it comes to Mr. Vann here—whose career I have watched with interest since he came to Chicago from Springfield, Illinois, years back. And who—but let’s quit discussing mere fantasy.” He turned to the defendant. “Well, now that we concede what a huge proportion of your story is worth absolutely minus-zero—in a legal sense, I mean, Doe—since it doesn’t tie you to a specific point in Time and Space with respect to the point in Time and Space of this murder—suppose I re-narrate it—as you should have done! Laying it, of course, in the alibi-location—this lonely house on Hobury Heights, Minneapolis, surrounded by bleak prairie region, and owned by one Mortimer King, Minneapolis bookmaker. Very well. Now in 300 words, I believe, I can re-tell all of your story that is of any utility whatsoever for clearing you. And after I have done so—well, we shall then see what we shall do next! So pay attention now, Doe; pay close attention. For here’s your real alibi-story.”

  CHAPTER XIII

  Exegesis

  Judge Penworth paused scarcely a second, and then launched forth with his “300-word” rendition of the long two-hour story just told.

  “At 9 p.m. last night, Doe,” he recounted judicially, “you entered the home of this Mortimer King, there outside of Minneapolis, as a plain sneak thief. And armed. Scarcely had you gotten into the upstairs library, however, when King himself, having lost his keys, entered by a window—via a ladder. You thought he was a burglar—put your gun on him—and even, when a phone call subsequently came from some attorney, one Solomon Steenburg of Buffalo, wanting to see King immediately, you locked King in the closet. You then admitted Steenhurg—”

  “Yes, Your Honor; and as King, I tallied with him from fully 9:45 to around 11:20, for—”

  “And the gist of said talk,” Judge Penworth hurriedly put in, “was that he sought a certain skull, which he’d laboriously traced to King’s possession, where it was a mere ‘luck-piece,’ for a certain reformed ex-gangster client of his, of near Chica­go, referred to only as ‘Big Shoes,’ who couldn’t come up to Minneapolis because of the Habitual Criminal Act. Since—”

  “Yes, Your Honor—a skull which, as Steenburg claimed he alone knew, had been secretly and illicitly loaned, by some servant girl of King’s—one Rozalda Mardzienski, to some Polish doctor-lover of hers to make a practise sphenoidal operation on, so he could operate on his own brother—”

  “—’Two-Gun’ Polack Eddy—yes!” said the Judge weari­ly. “But I thought I was re-telling this story! All right. And let’s leave out all people who can’t even place you as having been in Minneapolis at any time. Well, the skull was that of one ‘Blinky,’ a one-eyed blond gigolo, murdered some years before on a gang ride, on which ‘Big Shoes’ had been an innocent participant. The skull had been dug up by some farmer, and sold to King; it had recently been delivered back there to the King house by some ‘old negro’ able to identify it at most, in contrast to some other skull, by the penciled init­ials on it—’M.K.’—meaning obviously ‘Mortimer King’ in­stead of ‘Moses Klump,’ eh?”

  “Same in all particulars,” put in the witness desperately, “as that skull over there. Since—”

  “Naturally,” put in the Judge dryly. “Since it got tossed out onto the grass later. And, when you even later made King open his own safe, thinking he was some sort of Jimmy Valentine—and he did so, and got hold of a gun, and blazed away at you—and you dropped flat—the while he turned about and called up some bookmaking friend to come there and help him out in something—you tiptoed to the open window, slid down the ladder into the night, grabbed the skull—and raced for the ‘Scotchman’s Special,’ some fast freight to Chicago, leaving Minneapolis around midnight or thereabouts, and—But that’s your story, isn’t it—boiled down?”

  “Boiled down is right,” admitted the prisoner lugubriously. “But—”

  “All right. Then King and Steenburg are the only people who can place you in Minneapolis. But can do nothing toward explaining why on earth you made, to Archbishop Pell, the hopelessly incriminating remark you did. So let’s follow things up here in Chicago. Where did you get the crimson box with which you were supposed to stand on that corner—vividly marked for an unknown criminal not described to you, outside of the fact that his feet were long, and known to you only as ‘Big Shoes’—and wait to be approached by him with five hundred dollars?”

  “’Twas just a shoe-box, Your Honor, that I picked up in an alley here in Chicago—inked all over with a five-cent bot­tle of Cartford’s Brilliant-Crimson fountain pen ink. I did it in five minutes in a five-cent pay toilet room at the Passenger Depot.”

  “Hm!” And Penworth was silent.

  “Well, letting all that pass for the moment—you’ve got something to explain now, Doe, that no amount of witnesses up there in Minneapolis can explain for you. When you opened the sealed envelope of instructions which, during your interview with Steenburg, you didn’t have time to open, but put in your breast pocket—when you opened that en­velope—just where and when did you open it?”

  “About an hour after sunup this morning, Your Honor, with my buttocks planted on the threshold of one of those refrig­erator cars in the Scotchman’s Special, and my feet on the threshold of the next one! Read it and digested its direc­tions from A to Izzard, and tore it up into bits which probably are scattered now all the way between Madison, Wisconsin and Janesville, Wisconsin.”

  “No doubt! Well, you had already been told, so we under­stand, that the emissary from Minneapolis—yourself, as mat­ters later eventuated—was to stand on Adams and Dearborn Streets, Chicago, from noontime on today, with the skull in the box, and the box punched out in a few places to suggest that it held a toad or a kitten or something—and bright crimson so that this ‘Big Shoes’ could spot it—and the emissary. But what else further did the instructions tell you?”

  “Well, they said, Your Honor, that as further evidence of the emissary’s being on the up and up—genuine, that is, Your Honor,
and not a detective—he should be working—or ap­pearing to work—on a crossword puzzle.”

  “Which it seems you were doing, when arrested. Working on a crossword puzzle.”

  “Pardon me, Your Honor, but I never work on them—I did so many in my life when the craze was on that practically all I do, if I work one today, is just to fill in the spaces!”

  “Indeed? Well, I have always considered myself the swift­est crossword puzzle worker in Cook County. I suppose—” the Judge was plainly a bit nettled. “—you don’t even have to use a thesaurus as I do—now and again? That remarkable memory of yours, I take it, remembers all the rare words?”

  “It does, yes—Your Honor.”

  “Hrmph!” the Judge snorted. “Well, dropping that angle,” he said suddenly, “this ‘Big Shoes’ as I understand matters, was to come up eventually and—and just what?”

  “He was to first introduce himself. By a code name given in the instructions.”

  “The name of Chicago’s famous churchman, eh? Well—”

  “Oh no, Your Honor. No, indeed.”

  “No? Well, how—that is, why—but we’ll come to that when we come to it, I daresay. And what was he to do after tentatively identifying himself as the—the putative—”

  “—McCoy, Your Honor! The McCoy, yes. Well, he was then to toss his eyes on my crossword puzzle and was to ask me casually—like a crossword puzzle enthusiast himself, if by any chance I knew a four-letter word meaning ‘an enclosing structure made of hard material—’”

  “‘Dike,’ of course,” put in Penworth. “Go on. And you were supposed to do—what?”

  “I was supposed to answer immediately—right off the bat—the best I could. Wrong or right—but the quickness of my reply was the test of my being—”

  “The McCoy!” put in the Judge helpfully. “And then you were to pass the box—or rather move up the street together, and—”