The Case of the Horrified Heirs by Erle Stanley Gardner Read Free Book Online

said.
    "Do you know where he lived?"
    "Someplace in the San Joaquin Valley, I think."
    "Could you find out where?"
    "I might be able to."
    Virginia Baxter had been sizing up the man and finally unlatched the door chain. "Won't you come in?" she invited. "I think perhaps I can consult an old diary. I have been keeping diaries for years-" She laughed nervously-"not the romantic type, you understand, but business diaries that contain little comments about when I went to work at a certain place and how long I worked there, events of the day, when I received raises in salary and things of that sort.
    "I know that I made some entries at the time of Mr. Bannock's death-oh, wait a minute, I remember now, J ulian Bannock lived near Bakersfield."
    "Do you know if he still lives there?"
    "No, I don't. I remember now that he came down driving a pickup. The files were loaded into the pickup. I remember that after the files were loaded, I felt that my responsibility was ended. I turned the keys over to the brother."
    "Bakersfield?" Menard said.
    "That's right. Now, if you can tell me something about your agreement, perhaps I can remember about it. Mr. Bannock had a one-man office and I did all of the typing."
    "It was an agreement with a man named Smith," Menard said.
    "What was the nature of the agreement?"
    "Oh, it involved a lot of complicated things about the sale of a machine shop. You see, I'm interested, or was interested, in machinery and thought for a while I'd go into the machinery business, but-Well, it's a long story."
    "What are you doing now?" she asked.
    Menard's eyes suddenly shifted. "I'm sort of freelancing," he said, "buying and selling."
    "Real estate?" she asked.
    "Oh, anything," he said.
    "You live here in the city?"
    He laughed, obviously ill at ease. "I keep going from place to place-you know how it is when a person is looking for bargains."
    Virginia said, "I see. Well, I'm sorry I can't help you any more than I have."
    She stood up and moved toward the door.
    Menard accepted the dismissal.
    "Thank you so much," he said, and walked out.
    Virginia watched him to the elevator then, when the door of the cage had slid shut, took to the stairs and raced down them.
    She was in time to see him jump into a dark-colored car which had been parked in the only vacant parking space at the curb, a space directly beside a fireplug.
    She tried to get the license number but was unable to get it all, because of the speed with which the driver whipped out into the street and drove away.
    Her eyes focused on a distinctive zero as the first of the numbers and she had a somewhat vague impression that the last figure of the license was a two.
    The car she thought was an Oldsmobile, perhaps two to four years old, but here again she couldn't be certain. The man gunned the car into speed and drove away fast.
    Virginia returned to her apartment, went into her bedroom, pulled out a suitcase, started rummaging through her diaries. She found the address of Julian Bannock in Bakersfield, an R.F.D. box and a notation in parentheses, "no telephone."
    Then her phone rang. A woman said, "I found your name in the telephone directory. I just wanted to call you to tell you how glad I am that you beat that horrible frameup."
    "Thank you very much," Virginia said.
    "I'm a stranger to you," the woman went on, "but I wanted you to know how I felt."
    Within the next hour there were five more calls, including one from a man who was obviously drunk and certainly offensive, and another from a woman who wanted a willing ear to hear about her case.
    Finally, Virginia ignored the telephone, which continued to ring, until she went out to dinner.
    The next morning she asked the telephone company to change her number and give her an unlisted one.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Virginia found she couldn't entirely get the matter of those papers off her mind.
    After all, Julian Bannock had been a rancher. He and his brother had not been particularly close, and Julian was interested