The Case of the Caretaker's Cat by Erle Stanley Gardner Read Free Book Online Page A

Nurses were in constant attendance, but – and here's the phony part – he'd been in a coma for days prior to his death. He hadn't regained consciousness."
    "Then how the devil," Mason asked, "could he have signed his name on that card?"
    Drake said tonelessly, "I'll bite, how could he?"
    "What else about him?" Mason asked.
    "Apparently he and Ashton are chips off the same block. Ashton went for years without seeing him or speaking to him. It wasn't until Ashton heard that Clammert was dying in the charity ward of a hospital that he came to help him out."
    "How did you get this stuff?" Mason asked.
    "Ashton talked quite a bit to one of the nurses. She got a kick out of him. He was so bitterly vindictive and yet so big-hearted. He'd heard Clammert was sick and broke, so he hobbled around, making a canvass of the hospitals until he found Clammert lying unconscious and near death. He dug down in his pocket and did everything he could, hired specialists, got special nurses and haunted the bedside. He left instructions with the nurse to see that Clammert had everything money could buy. Of course, the nurse knew he was dying and the doctors knew it, but, naturally, they kidded Ashton along, telling him there was perhaps one chance in a million, and Ashton told them to take that chance.
    "But just to show you what a cantankerous cuss you've got for a client, he stipulated that when Clammert recovered consciousness, he was never to know who his benefactor had been. Ashton told the nurses they quarreled years ago and hadn't seen each other since – and what do you think they quarreled about?"
    Mason said irritably, "I'll bite, Little Peter Rabbit, what did Ruddy the Lame Fox and Goofy the Sleeping Beauty quarrel about?"
    The detective grinned and said, "A cat."
    "A cat?" Mason exclaimed.
    "That's right – a cat by the name of Clinker – it was just a kitten then."
    "Oh, hell," Mason said disgustedly.
    "As near as I can figure out," Drake went on, "from the time Ashton discovered his half-brother until Clammert died a couple of days later, Ashton had spent something like five hundred dollars in hospital and doctors' bills. He paid everything out in cash. The nurse said he had a big sheaf of bills he carried in his wallet. Now, then, where the hell did Charles Ashton get that money?"
    Mason made a grimace. "Shucks, Paul, I didn't want you to dig up facts that would put my client in a spot; I wanted you to dig up something that would put Sam Laxter in a spot."
    "Well," Drake remarked in his dry, expressionless voice, "they're some of the pieces in the puzzle picture. I'm hired to get the pieces; you're hired to put them together. If they're going to make the wrong kind of picture when they're put together, you can always lose some of the pieces so no one else can find them."
    Mason chuckled, then said thoughtfully, "Why the devil did Ashton want it so Clammert could go to that safety deposit box?"
    "Well, the only thing I could think of," Drake said, "was that if Clammert got well Ashton intended to give him money but didn't intend to have any personal contact, so he arranged to give Clammert a key to a safety deposit box into which he'd put money from time to time and Clammert could take it out."
    "That doesn't make sense," Mason said, "because Clammert would have to sign his name to get access to the box and the signature that Ashton turned in as being that of Clammert couldn't have been made by Clammert because Clammert was unconscious."
    "Okay," Drake said, "you win. That's what I meant when I said the facts were the pieces in the puzzle. I get them and you put them together."
    "Did anyone using Clammert's name ever go to the safety deposit boxes?" Mason asked.
    "No, Clammert's never been near the box. Ashton went to it several times. He went to it yesterday, and he went to it today. While the clerks didn't want to talk about it, I gathered the impression they thought Ashton had pulled out a wad of dough from those safety boxes