Here’s the last box, Cece,” Mr. Grandy said, setting it down on the floor with a grunt. Sweat was pouring off his brow, but he didn’t mind a hoot. The man had finally triumphed.
The big boss, Mrs. Murphy, looked like a punk-rock mother hen. Her auburn hair was organized into plumes. Actually, that made her more of a rooster.
“What happened to you, dear?” She gaped at my ripped pants and multicolored bruises.
“I had a little fall,” I said. “Nothing to worry about.”
She made some clucking noises.
“Well, let us know if you need new pencils or an eraser. Promise?”
“Oh, Cece’s going to be here for a long time,” Mr. Grandy said with an evil smile.
The boxes formed a barricade. I was surrounded. I wasn’t out of there until they decided I was. And that was fine with me, because I had no intention of leaving the job unfinished. I was going to go through every scrap of paper in every one of those twenty boxes until I found what I was looking for.
ESG’s legal files. Mr. Grandy was right. This was a treasure trove. None of the other biographers had had access to this kind of material.
I bent over the first box and pulled out a file. Arnetta Hillv. Oxnard. Sounded official. I skimmed the pages. Gardner’s firm had been hired by a little old lady who was royally pissed at the City of Oxnard. In 1880, she’d planted fifty-five walnut trees along a road on her own land. When she donated the road to the city years later, she stipulated that they not touch the trees, a promise on which they were preparing to renege. After losing the case the first time around, ESG saved the trees on appeal. Noticing that three of the jurists were elderly, he played on their sympathies for sweet Arnetta. It worked brilliantly. My mother swears up and down this is the Century of the Senior. She and ESG both.
Magby v. New York Life Insurance Company. Now here was a guy who really wanted to off himself. He ingested poison, slashed his throat with a bedspring, and was finally found dead in his garage with the motor of his car running. The family hired Gardner’s firm to prove it wasn’t suicide because the insurance company would pay out only in the case of accidental death. Gardner produced a weather report which indicated that on the day of Magby’s demise there had been a brisk wind, strong enough to blow the garage door shut and inadvertently do the guy in. The jury bought it. Actually, I remembered this one. Gardner pulled out the same argument in the A. A. Fair novel Double or Quits.
Brown v. Becker. Joseph Becker agrees to sell a tractor to his neighbor, Benjamin Brown. Later, the tractor turns out to have been in poor repair. Becker claims he knew nothing of the problems with the machine, and the contract is voided because of a mutual mistake in fact. But Brown is not satisfied. He feels duped. He has been delayed in planting his fields and is convinced Becker knew the truth about the tractor all along. He hires ESG’s firm and sues. Notes in the file indicate that the five requirements for fraud, all of which must be present, are: 1. Misrepresentation of a material fact; 2. Made knowingly; 3. With intent to defraud; 4. Justifiably relied upon; 5. Causing injury to the other party. ESG finds a neighbor who overheard Becker’s wife gloating to the post-mistress about her husband’s business acumen. Apparently, that was enough to satisfy the jury. Wonder if ESG handled the Beckers’ divorce?
I had to get serious here. I had to keep my eye on the prize. I needed to go further back, back to the teens. Gardner had first hung out his shingle in 1911, in Oxnard, when he joined I. W. Stewart’s law office. In 1916, he formed the law firm of Orr and Gardner in Ventura, which became Orr, Gardner, Drapeau, and Sheridan, and later Benton, Orr, Duval, and Buckingham, and who knows what else in between. The papers that had been donated to the historical society dated from 1912 to 1926, which was when Gardner’s law offices had moved to the new building on the corner of California and Main. What I was looking for was in there, I knew it.
More files. Divorce cases, petty thefts, slander trials, property disputes; 1924, 1917, 1925, 1920. The files were in no particular order. Not chronological, not alphabetical. These people could’ve used a crack secretary like Allison. I looked up at the clock. It was after five P.M. Not much time left.
Mr. Grandy tiptoed over. “How’s it going, Cece?”
“Fine, I guess, but I’ve only gone through one box and you’re about to close and I haven’t found what I’m looking for.”
“Do you have a date?”
“Oh, not tonight. But I’m busy tomorrow and Sunday,” I said quickly. I could’ve sworn Mr. Grandy was gay.
“No, no,” he said. “I’m spoken for, silly. I meant, do you have a date you’re looking for? And/or a name? I forgot to give you this.” He handed me a slim folder. “It’s an index we put together.”
I grabbed it and tore through the pages. And there it was. Box 16. Mr. Grandy helped me hoist it onto the desk. My hands were trembling as I began to page through the files. “Abbot,” “Ackerman,” “Anderson.” Shit. It wasn’t there. How could this be? I flipped back to the front and started again, more calmly this time, as if I did this sort of thing every day. And then I found it, right where it was supposed to be, a thick file bearing the name “Albacco,” typed onto a yellowed label. The “c” key must’ve stuck a little. The letters floated above the others like a pair of lovebirds.
I opened the file. City of Ventura v. Albacco, November 1916. Joseph Albacco’s grandfather, William, is accused in an assault. The incident occurs around ten P.M., in an alleyway not far from his place of business, Elvie’s Trophy Company, on Main. The victim, who suffered a broken arm and a concussion, identifies William Albacco in a lineup. There is no corroborating evidence. Albacco maintains his innocence throughout. During the trial, Gardner asks the victim to remove his glasses and to identify his wife in the courtroom. He cannot. Gardner then produces evidence that the victim had lost his spectacles the week before the incident and was still waiting for a replacement on the day the assault took place. How could a nearsighted person make a positive ID? Good question. Albacco was acquitted. A classic Perry Mason gambit.
One year later, October 1917. William Albacco’s son, Joseph Albacco, gets in touch with Erle Stanley Gardner, the lawyer who’d exonerated his father. Here it is. I knew it. I knew this family’s relationship to ESG was complicated. Joseph Sr. hires ESG to set up a limited-partnership agreement between himself and his friend Morgan Allan. Oh, this was amazing. Erle Stanley Gardner got the two of them together. ESG, the lawyer of choice “of all classes except the upper and middle classes.” He was there from the beginning. No wonder Jean’s murder rang a bell.
The agreement was executed the following month, in the city of Ventura, state of California. The documents noted that each of the limited partners was free from any liability beyond what they had contributed to the partnership. Joseph Albacco contributed five hundred dollars; Morgan Allan, five hundred. Their assets consisted of two pieces of property. Two? I kept reading. There were two parcels of land. Each man owned a 50 percent interest in each parcel as tenants-in-common. One was the tidelands parcel I already knew about. What about the other one? Parcels 17–22 of Lots 8 and 9, map of the Ventura Avenue Field, filed January 11, 1902, Map Book A, page 33, Ventura County Hall of Records. That was the legal description. But what did it refer to?
The Ventura Avenue Field. I remembered that name. It was a famous oil field. It was the oil field where records were broken in the mid-twenties, ten thousand barrels a day, fifteen thousand, extraordinary numbers like that. Jesus. The most valuable piece of land in the state. They owned that? No wonder Morgan Allan became a billionaire.
But why didn’t Joe’s father become a billionaire, too?