Chapter 19

Perry Mason sat in his office. Della Street looked across the desk at him with starry eyes.

"Are you going to defend Peter Laxter?" she asked.

"If they prosecute him I am."

"I don't see how you knew what had happened."

"I didn't," he said, "at first. But I had a shrewd suspicion later on. There were two or three things which gave me a pretty good idea. Notice the manner in which Frank Oafley married Edith DeVoe. During the time he was living with Peter Laxter he said his courting was of necessity surreptitious because of Peter Laxter's objections. But he thought Peter Laxter was dead after the house had burned up. There was no necessity for having a secret marriage ceremony and no necessity for not going on a honeymoon, but returning to the Laxter home. I am forced to conclude, therefore, that the reason both parties were so anxious to have the marriage ceremony performed was due to the fact that they realized a wife could not be examined against her husband without the consent of her husband, nor a husband be compelled to give testimony against his wife. This was because they knew the conspiracy was likely to be discovered, and that means that, in some manner, they had found out Ashton had knowledge of the conspiracy. They thought Peter Laxter was dead. Therefore, Ashton was the only one who could have known it.

"But the really significant clue is the one of the crutch. The theory of the prosecution was that the person who murdered Ashton had taken the crutch to Edith DeVoe's apartment and then murdered Edith DeVoe. That manifestly would have been impossible unless Edith DeVoe had been a party to the Ashton murder, because the crutch wasn't sawed up when taken there. It was sawed up in the apartment, and pieces of it had been burned in the grate. That would indicate that Ashton had been in the apartment; that his murderers had cut up the crutch after they'd killed him."

"Where would you have been if the police hadn't apprehended the grandfather?" Della Street asked.

"I don't know," Mason said. "I might have been able to make it stick, and I might not, but I think I could have pieced the facts together."

"Why didn't you accuse Oafley earlier?" she asked.

"Because," said Mason slowly, "of various factors involved. In the first place, I wanted Douglas Keene to come through, and, in the second place," and he chuckled, "I wanted to grandstand. If I had tipped off the police, they'd have taken all the credit, and they might have bungled the case so that Keene would never have been really vindicated. They might even have framed him. And I wanted Oafley to admit under oath being with Edith DeVoe at the exact time Ashton was murdered."

"And," she said, "last but not least, you so love to skate on thin ice that you like to play people one against the other while you take all kinds of chances."

"Perhaps," he grinned. "As I've told you before, I like to play a nolimit game."

"But why didn't you get Drake to find Watson Clammert?"

"He probably couldn't have done it in time. He'd have been handicapped. The best organized law enforcement agency in the country today is the one perfected by insurance companies to apprehend automobile thieves. They've worked out a perfect system of coordination. Ordinarily police don't coordinate. They do in automobile cases. So I fixed things so Watson Clammert would be apprehended as a car thief. That got me quicker results, enabled us to have him arrested, and brought about his confession. After all, it was really very simple. By going to the Biltmore Hotel, establishing our identities as honeymooners, letting the clerk see our new car, and get interested in you, then having you conceal the car and report it as stolen, we started in motion the machinery which was bound to put a finger on Clammert. He was entirely unsuspecting. He was driving the car he had purchased under his assumed name. It was only a matter of hours until he'd be arrested."

"Well," Della Street said, "the Lord knows your methods are unconventional, but I will say this for them, they're effective."

He grinned at her.

"And," she said, "now that we've finished up this case, we have an extra Buick sedan on our hands. What are we going to do with it; sell it, or sell the convertible?"

"No, Mason said slowly, "we'd better keep them both."

She raised her eyebrows.

"You see," he said, "it's a handy car to have around—in case I should ever want to go on a honeymoon."