Страница 8 из 47
Mason said, "No, Duncan, we won't forget the ship."
"And," Duncan assured him, "we won't forget you." He escorted them down the corridor until the uniformed guard had opened the outer door. "Well, good night, boys," he said. "Come back any time."
He turned and retraced his steps down the corridor. Mason took the detective's arm and led him toward the gangway where departing patrons caught the speed boat.
"Was that Sylvia Oxman?" Drake asked.
"It must have been," Mason said, "and when she failed to recognize you and you gave her a dead pan, Duncan saw the play. Remember, you're supposed to be the lady's husband."
"Doesn't that leave us in something of a spot," Drake asked anxiously, "having tried to pick up the lady's notes and pulled all this hocus-pocus?"
"That depends on the breaks," Mason said gloomily. "Evidently it isn't our night to gamble."
Drake pushed his fingers down inside his collar, ran them around the neckband of his shirt, and said, "Let's beat it. If we're going to be pinched, I sure as hell don't want to go to jail in this outfit."
CHAPTER 4
MASON LOOKED across his desk at Matilda Benson and said, "I sent for you because I'm going to ask you a lot of questions."
"May I ask you some first?" she inquired.
He nodded.
"You saw Grieb?"
"Yes."
"Get anywhere?"
Mason shook his head and said, "Not yet. The breaks went against me."
She eyed him in shrewd appraisal. "I suppose you don't go in much for alibis and explanations."
Mason shook his head and was silent.
"Do you want to tell me about it?"
"No."
"Well, then, what's the next move?" she asked.
Mason said, "I'm going to try him again-this time from another angle. Before I do, I want to know more of what I'm up against."
She opened her purse, took out her cigar case and selected a cigar. While she was cutting off the end, Mason scratched a match and held it across the desk to her. She regarded him with twinkling eyes through the first white puffs of cigar smoke and said, "All right, go ahead. Ask your questions."
"What do you know about Grieb?"
"Nothing much. Just what my granddaughter tells me. He's hard and ruthless. I warned you he wouldn't be easy."
"Know anything about Duncan?"
"Sylvia says he doesn't count. He's sort of a yes-man."
"I think your granddaughter is fooled," Mason said.
"I wouldn't doubt it. She's too young to know much about men of that type. She can size up the sheiks all right, tell just about when they're going to start getting ambitious and what their line's going to be, but she can't size up gamblers."
"Her husband wants to get a divorce?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Why do men usually want to get divorces?"
Mason shook his head impatiently and said, "You'll have to play fair with me, Mrs. Benson. What's behind all this?"
She smoked in silence for a few seconds and said, "When my granddaughter is twenty-six, which'll be next year, she gets one-half of a trust fund, and her daughter, Virginia, who's six, gets the other half, unless a judge should decide Sylvia isn't a fit person to have the custody of Virginia. In that case, Virginia gets all of it."
"And with a situation like that brewing," Mason said incredulously, "she's given IOU's to a couple of gamblers?"
Matilda Benson nodded. "Sylvia's always done pretty much as she pleased. That's why the property was left in trust and not given to her outright."
"So her husband's trying to get some evidence which'll give him a divorce and cause Sylvia to lose her share of the trust funds?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"So his daughter will have twice as much money, and so he can have the handling of that money. If he ever finds out about those IOU's, he'll get them and use them to show Sylvia can't be trusted with money. He has other evidence, too, but, right now, he wants to show she can't be trusted with money. You'll have to work fast. I want those IOU's before Sam Grieb finds out how important they are."
Mason said slowly, "I think Grieb already knows."
"Then we're licked before we start."
"No, we're not licked, but I begin to see why you wanted a lawyer. How much is the trust fund?"
"Half a million in all. If Frank Oxman ever gets the custody of Virginia and gets his hands on the money it'll be like signing the kid's death warrant."
"Surely not that bad," Mason said.
"That man's like a rattlesnake."
"He'd be under the control and supervision of the courts," Mason pointed out.
She laughed mirthlessly. "You don't know Frank Oxman. Sylvia isn't any match for him. As long as I'm here I'll fight him, but I'm almost seventy. I'm not going to be here forever."
"But look here," Mason said, "a court wouldn't deprive Sylvia of the custody of her child simply because she'd been gambling."
"There are other things," Matilda Benson said grimly.
"How about Frank Oxman; does he have any money?"
"He has a little to gamble with."
"What sort of gambling?"
"The stock market mostly. That's considered respectable. Sylvia plays roulette, and that's considered immoral. People make me sick. They're hypocrites."
"What I'm trying to find out," Mason said, "is how Oxman is going to get the money to take up those IOU's."
"Don't worry, he'll raise that all right."
"How?"
"There's a ring that will put up money for things like that," she said. "Occasionally Frank is able to fix a prize fight or a horse race or something of that sort. He can always raise the necessary money to make a killing then."
"Sylvia will pay off those IOU's if she gets that money from the trust fund?"
"Of course."
"No matter who has the IOU's?"
Matilda Benson nodded.
"It would help a lot," Mason said slowly, "if she wouldn't."
"What do you mean?"
"If Frank Oxman is going to buy those IOU's he'd have to offer cash for them. He'd have to offer the amount of the notes plus a bonus. If he's borrowing the money, he'd have to put up the IOU's as collateral. If the people who were loaning the money thought the collateral wasn't good, they'd refuse to put up the money."
"No," she said slowly, "that won't work. Sylvia would never go back on her word."
Mason said, "I have an idea. I don't know how good it is, but I think it may work. From what I saw last night, I think there's friction between Grieb and Duncan. I have an idea that friction may be sufficiently intensified to throw them into a court of equity. A court wouldn't consider the gambling business an equitable asset. But there's quite a lot of money invested in furniture and fixtures, and the partnership must have that gambling ship under lease. Now, if I could start the pair fighting, and one of the partners should drag the other into court and have a receiver appointed to wind up the partnership business, they couldn't transfer those notes. And if I pointed out to a federal court that the notes had been given to secure a gambling debt, it would probably refuse to consider them as assets."
Matilda Benson leaned forward. "Listen," she said, "I don't want to be held up by a couple of crooked gamblers. But if you can pull something like this, the sky's the limit so far as expenses are concerned."
"Which brings us," Mason said casually, "to the question of why you're so anxious to get those IOU's. If you make Sylvia a present of them, the effect is just the same as though you'd given her the money to go and pay them off. And that wouldn't take any premium. Therefore…"
Della Street gently opened the door from the outer office and said in a low voice, "Charles Duncan is in the outer office, Chief. He says he wants to see you personally and that it's important."
Matilda Benson's gray eyes stared significantly at the lawyer. "That means," she said, "they've already approached Oxman, and Duncan is going to play one bidder against the other."