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"Then Oxman must have been in there long enough to have talked with Grieb. Is that right?" Drake asked.
"Yes, that's right. I saw him go in. I didn't see him come out. I thought I was keeping my eye peeled all the time, but you know how it is when you're watching a dice slicker, and Oxman must have gone out without my seeing him. It's a cinch someone paid off those IOU's. I don't think the dame did it. She didn't have the dough for one thing."
"Well, then," Mason said, "what you're getting at is that Oxman must have killed him."
"No," Ma
Drake said, "Wait a minute, Perry, and let me handle this. I know the whole story… Now, Arthur, why do you think Oxman didn't kill him?"
"Because if Oxman had paid off those IOU's and then killed him, he certainly wouldn't have left the seventy-five hundred dollars in the desk drawer, and if he'd killed him before he'd paid the IOU's, he'd never have left the money there."
Mason's face showed disappointment. He said, "I'm sorry, Paul, but this isn't getting us anywhere. This guy's deductions are just deductions. Anyone can guess what happened from…"
"Wait a minute," Drake interrupted significantly.
Mason caught the look in the detective's eye and became silent.
"Now then," Drake said, "having figured that Oxman didn't kill him, who did?
"Well, like I said," Ma
"How did he die, then?"
"He committed suicide."
"What makes you think he committed suicide?"
"I think Duncan had the goods on him. I think Sam had been dipping into the partnership funds. Duncan suspected it. Grieb put most of his money in the business and then had some losses in the stock market. Grieb handled all the money. I think he knew Duncan was calling for a showdown and knew that, as soon as a receiver stepped in, Duncan could send him to jail, and he knew Duncan wouldn't want anything better than that.
"The only chance Grieb had to make a killing was to get Oxman to pay a fancy sum for those IOU's. I think at first Grieb thought he could get maybe ten thousand bucks premium and make Oxman promise never to say anything about it. Then Grieb could have told Duncan that Oxman wouldn't pay any premium for the notes and he'd had to let them go for their face value. That would have suited Duncan all right for he'd never have checked up on it, and Grieb could have used the extra cash to square off his shortage."
Mason said impatiently, "Damn it, Paul, this isn't getting us anywhere. I can think up a dozen different theories that…"
He once more stopped in mid-sentence as he caught the look in Drake's eyes.
"Now, what makes you think Grieb could have committed suicide?" Drake asked. "The police experts all say it was murder."
"I know they do, but the reason they say that is because they can't find the gun. Now, Grieb was killed with a.38 caliber automatic that he ordinarily kept in the upper left-hand drawer of his desk."
"How do you know?" the detective asked.
"Why, we went over all that in your office," Ma
"Never mind what we went over in my office," Drake told him. "You just begin from scratch and tell Mr. Mason the whole story. I want him to hear it the way you tell it and not the way I'd try to tell it."
"Well," Ma
"All right," Drake said, glancing again at Mason, "that gives us a pretty good sketch of Duncan's character. What's that got to do with the suicide?"
"Well, when they started business," Ma
"Mason's a lawyer. He knows all about business and partnership insurance," Drake interrupted. "Go ahead and tell us the rest of it."
"Well, those policies had a provision that if a partner committed suicide within the first year, the insurance company only had to pay the amount of the premiums which had been paid in. On the other hand, if the death took place by violence or by accident, the surviving partner got double the face of the policy. Now then, you see where that leaves Charlie Duncan. If Sammy committed suicide, Duncan can't collect a cent under the policy except a few hundred dollars which were paid as premiums. He has to wind up the partnership business and he has to give one-half of all the assets to Sammy's heirs. But if he could prove Sammy was murdered, then he'd get forty thousand dollars instead of twenty. He could keep the whole partnership business, and he'd only have to pay over twenty thousand to the heirs.
"You see what I mean. When they took out the partnership insurance, the insurance had this clause about death by violence, but in the agreement they overlooked that and agreed on a payment of a flat amount of twenty thousand dollars, which one partner would pay to the other."
Perry Mason pursed his lips in thought, met Drake's significant glance and nodded his head.
"Go ahead, Arthur," Drake said.
"Well, Charlie's a quick thinker. Now, I'm just betting that as soon as he walked into that room and saw Grieb dead, he realized the position that he'd be in. I think he knew Sammy had been dipping into the till, and that was one of the reasons he was so anxious to have a receiver appointed.
"Now then. Charlie busted into that room and saw Sammy sitting at his desk, dead. He knew damn well it was a suicide, but Perry Mason, the lawyer, was right there in the office, and Charlie had a deputy United States marshal with him who had been called in to serve the papers on Sammy. Now, I think that Charlie knew there was evidence there which would prove Sammy had killed himself, and what he wanted was to ditch that evidence. In order to do it, he had to get rid of both this man Perkins and Perry Mason, and the best way he could think of was to pretend Perry Mason had bumped Sammy off, and, of course, to protect his own interests, he kept yelling murder right from the start. Charlie's an awfully smooth guy when he has to be. He's a fast worker and a quick thinker, and…"