The Case of the Deadly Toy by Erle Stanley Gardner

Author:Erle Stanley Gardner [Gardner, Erle Stanley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Crime, Mystery & Detective, General, Mytery, Detective, Suspense
ISBN: 9781471908699
Google: uZghAQAAQBAJ
Amazon: B008H766TM
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 1959-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

From the nearest phone Mason called Paul Drake.

“Rush some men out to the airport, Paul. Look for Robert Selkirk, a boy of seven years of age, aristocratic in bearing. He’s accompanied by a woman named Grace Hallum, blonde, blue eyes, twenty-seven years old, with a good figure. She worked for a while as a model, married, collected some alimony and is living now partially on alimony and partially by supplementing her income by baby-sitting. They’ll probably have a couple of hours’ start on you and will have been on a plane for someplace outside of the jurisdiction of the local courts. Try Mexico City first, then try everything you can get. Cover all passenger lists, see if you can locate a woman, any woman, traveling with a seven-year-old boy.”

“There’ll be hundreds of them,” Drake said.

“Not with a departure time of the last two hours. My best guess is that reservations were first made over the telephone, then Barton Jennings took some cash and some of the kid’s clothes in a suitcase up to Grace Hallum’s apartment. He transferred the clothes there, came out with the empty suitcase.

“A taxicab went to the Cretonic Apartments and picked them up. See if you can locate the cab driver, find out what airline they were traveling on. Get busy.”

“Okay,” Drake promised. “You coming up here?”

“We’re on our way,” Mason told him.

“I could tell by the way he was carrying that suitcase when he came out that there was something wrong,”

“Your secretary just came in,” the operator told Mason.

“Stop at Paul’s office?” Mason asked.

“I don’t think so. I think she went on down the corridor to your office.”

“I’ll pick her up,” Mason said.

“Hello,” she said. “I just got here.”

“How come?” Mason asked.

“I rang the unlisted phone in your apartment, no answer. I rang Paul and he said you were out on a hot lead. I thought I’d come up and see if you needed anything.”

“Good girl,” Mason told her. “We’re working on something hot.”

“What is it?”

“Robert Selkirk. The way things look now, his mother and his stepfather left him alone while they went to the airport to meet Norda Allison. Robert was sleeping in a tent in the patio. It’s beginning to look as though Robert got frightened, sneaked into the house, took possession of that .22 Colt Woodsman, then went back to bed in his tent in the patio. Sometime in the night he was aroused by someone prowling around. That just could have been Mervin Selkirk who was engaged in planting that printing press in the Jennings’ storeroom.

“Evidently the dog they keep knew Mervin Selkirk well enough so he let Selkirk prowl around the place as a friend. Whoever it was, it was someone the dog knew.

“Robert got frightened and took a shot in the dark.

“Barton Jennings was supposed to take Robert to this camping expedition where the boys were going with their dogs. So he was able to ditch the dog somewhere, probably at a boarding kennel, and take Robert up to another baby sitter the boy knew.

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