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“But why did he want to murder Rease?”
“He had two reasons. Rease was the only other heir to Kent’s fortune, aside from Edna Hammer, who had recently become Harris’s legal wife. By murdering Rease, he got one heir out of the way and then, by pi
“But Kent had made a will disinheriting Edna.”
“No, he hadn’t. He was going to make such a will after Harris married Edna. That was why Harris arranged to have the ceremony a secret one. He thought he’d have a chance to get Kent out of the way before Kent learned of the marriage and changed his will.”
“But Harris himself was the one who asked Kent to change the will.”
Mason laughed and said, “That was a mighty ingenious touch. Harris is an adventurer, an exploiter and an opportunist. He realized that Edna Hammer was a mighty attractive young woman who was going to inherit a considerable fortune. He also had looked up the situation enough to know that Kent was kicking out every suitor who might be a fortune hunter. So Harris beat Kent to it by asking him to disinherit Edna after he married her. He was playing the same game Pritchard was. He’d picked up a little stake from somewhere and was using it to give himself a swell front, hoping he’d be able to marry a wealthy woman.”
“But what if Kent had taken him at his word and had already changed the will?”
“No,” Mason said, “ Kent was too much of a business man to do anything like that. He wanted to be certain Edna was happily married before he made a new will. Looking back on it, I don’t think Harris pla
“Then it couldn’t have been three o’clock in the morning when Duncan saw the sleepwalker?” Della asked.
“Certainly not. It was quarter past twelve. That was where coincidence happened to play right into Harris’s hands.
“He skipped out?” she asked.
“Sure. As soon as he heard me say that Mrs. Doris Sully Kent was in the courtroom and we’d reached a compromise, he knew that she’d testify about that telephone conversation, and tell me frankly about the conference with Maddox and Duncan. Harris realized early in the game that the fact she had left for Los Angeles right after that telephone conversation was a circumstance which was going to put him on the spot, if anyone happened to appreciate the full significance of what must have happened. And Duncan’s testimony about Maddox and he being together when they called Mrs. Kent at eleven o’clock damned Harris.”
“And Maddox skipped out, too?”
“Yes. He was mixed up in that fraud so that his only hope of coming out on top of the heap was to get a good settlement from Kent. With Kent in jail, he hoped to deal with Mrs. Kent. When he saw that door was closed, he skipped. He wasn’t ru
“But would there have been a case against Mr. Kent if Rease hadn’t changed bedrooms with Maddox?”
“Trace that back,” Mason said, “and you’ll find the suggestion came from Harris. Rease was a hypochondriac, and all Harris needed to do was to suggest he should change bedrooms in order to avoid a draft, and the thing was as good as done. Remember that Harris was the fairhaired boychild around that house. Likable, magnetic and all of that, he enjoyed the confidence of everyone.”
“Was the district attorney flabbergasted?” she asked.
“So damned flabbergasted he listened to me explaining the clews in the case to him in the Judge’s chambers and stuck his cigar back in his mouth wrong end to, and burnt his mouth out of shape,” Mason said, chuckling delightedly as he recalled the spectacle.
The End
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