Honest money and other short novels by Erle Stanley Gardner

Author:Erle Stanley Gardner [Gardner, Erle Stanley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Close Call, Black Mask, January 1933

Making the Breaks

THE DESK WAS PILED HIGH with law books. On a space which had been cleared in one corner was an electric coffee percolator bubbling steadily. An electric clock on a bookcase showed the time as two o’clock in the morning.

Ken Corning sipped black coffee from a cup which he held in his left hand. His eyes moved steadily down the printed text of a volume of the Atlantic Reporter. From time to time he made notes with a pencil.

The outer door gave forth rasping noises as a key was inserted into the lock. Then the door swung inward, and Helen Vail, Ken Corning’s secretary, walked across the outer office, stood in the doorway of the inner office, and surveyed the man at the desk with anxious, sympathetic eyes.

After a moment Ken Corning felt her presence, and looked up, scowling impatiently. The scowl changed to a tired smile. His eyes went swiftly to the windows, then back to the face of the clock.

“Thought it must be morning,” he said, “and you were coming to work ”

“No, it’s two o’clock. I was out at a cabaret, and ditched the party.”

“Why did you do that?” he asked.

Something in her face showed him that her visit was not at all casual, and that her eyes were anxious.

“Go ahead,” he said. “What is it?”

Helen Vail crossed the room to the side of his desk, pushed back a stacked pile of leather-bound law books, and rested one hip against the side of the desk, swinging one foot, the other foot braced on the floor.

“I don’t know, chief,” she said, “what it is.”

He looked at her, frowning. She slowly opened her purse and took out two one-hundred-dollar bills, which she placed on the desk in front of him.

He looked at them curiously.

“Been robbing a bank?” he asked.

She shook her head, “They were in my purse,” she told him.

“So I saw.”

“But,” she said, “I don’t know how they got there.”

“Don’t know what?”

“Don’t know how they got there.”

“‘What do you mean?”

“Just what I say. I was down at the cabaret, and a purse snatcher tried to grab my purse. One of the men in the party hit him on the jaw and knocked him down. A special detective ran up and there was quite a commotion. An officer came in, and there was a plainclothesman there in the cabaret. They recognized the purse snatcher as an old hand at the game, and arrested him. They wanted me to look in my purse and see if he’d taken anything. I told them it was impossible because he hadn’t even had the purse in his hands. He’d simply made a grab at it, but I kept hold of the purse.”

Ken Corning’s eyes were level-lidded with intense thought. His pupils were contracted until they seemed mere black needle points in the midst of a cold background.

“Go on,” he said.

“They looked in the purse.”

“Then what?”

“Nothing, except these hundred-dollar-bills were in there.”

“Did you say anything?” he inquired.

“No. Naturally I didn’t speak up and tell them that I didn’t know where this money came from.

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