Mason drove around the block, looking for a parking space. “Tell me, Paul,” he said, “just what you’ve found out about them.”
“Understand, Perry,” Drake apologized, “the information’s a little sketchy. After all, my men only had a few minutes...”
“Sure, never mind all that stuff,” Mason said. “Give me what you have.”
“Well, in the beginning, it started out to be a legitimate restaurant. They called it The Golden Plate then. They changed the name to The Golden Platter about the time they opened up the gambling joint upstairs.”
“Just the two of them?”
“That’s right, Bill Golding and Eva Tannis. Lately they’ve been passing as husband and wife, but apparently they aren’t married.”
“Any gambling experience before?” Mason asked.
“Lots of it. Golding ran a place in San Francisco, and then was floorman at a big casino in Mexico. Then he came back here, apparently broke, but always intending to open up a gambling place as soon as he got the funds.”
“How about the girl?”
“Eva Tannis was a come-on girl in the San Francisco place where Golding worked. You know, she gives the boys lucky hunches and a few drinks. Makes them feel like gay young blades. Pulls a little sex stuff and imbues the boys with the idea that faint heart never won fair lady. Then they feel their oats, and start plunging on the gambling table.”
“And it’s all fixed beforehand?” Mason asked, turning the comer to the right and preparing to edge into a parking place.
“No, that end of it’s on the up-and-up. All the gambling house wants is to get the play.”
“What if the boys win?” Mason asked.
“Then she’s already in strong with them. She keeps them playing until the house wins it back. In case the sucker quits while he’s still winner, she goes out with him, keeps in touch with him, makes a date for a couple of nights later, and steers him back to the joint. By that time, he’s cold and imbued with the idea that he has to buck the game in order to get anywhere. Then it’s all over.”
Mason, looking the neighborhood over, said, “Doesn’t look like much of a soup-and-fish trade, Paul.”
“It isn’t,” the detective told him. “It’s a joint. They’re trying to make a stake for a bigger place.”
“Okay,” Mason said, looking at the numbers, “let’s go.”
They detoured past a bedraggled blonde who held down the cashier’s desk, and Drake indicated a door which opened on a stairway. There was no protest as they climbed up a flight of dark stairs to a feebly illuminated corridor. The front end of the corridor was apparently fitted up as the office of a rooming house. There was a little counter, a register, a call bell on the table, and a sign saying, “Ring for the Manager.” Drake smacked his hands down smartly on the bell button and said to the lawyer, “We’d better flash a roll and act a little bit hilarious.”
The lawyer pulled a wallet from his pocket, leaned against the counter, and started counting money with the grave dignity of a drunk man trying to act sober. A door opened and a man said, “What do you boys want?”
Mason looked up at him and grinned. Drake motioned vaguely down the corridor and said, “Action. Wha’d’yuh s’pose?”
“I don’t exactly place you,” the man said dubiously.
Mason lunged against Drake, pushing the bills back into his wallet. “C’mon, Paul. The guy don’t want us. Let’s go back the other place.”
Drake said, “Not’n your life. This joint owes me a hun’erd forty bucks. I’m gonna collect.”
The man behind the counter said, “Okay, boys, go on in. Second door to the left.”
They walked down what was apparently the corridor of an ordinary rooming house, turned the knob of the second door on the left. Mason heard the sound of an electric buzzer, then a bolt shot back and a man opened the door.
What had, at one time, apparently been a series of rooms, had been joined into a large room. There was some pretense of giving it a veneer of elegance. The painted board floors were covered with brightly colored rugs. There were cheap oil paintings on the walls, but they were illuminated after the manner of masterpieces, with little individual electric lights shielded in chromium cylinders. There were two roulette tables, a crap table, two games of 21, and a wheel of fortune. A bar at the far end of the room was elaborately fitted with mirrors and subdued lights. There were probably thirty or forty men in the place, Mason judged, and perhaps fifteen women, of whom seven or eight were wearing backless evening gowns. Nearly all of the men were in business suits. Mason noticed but two dinner jackets. “Let’s not waste any time,” Mason said to Drake. “We’ve got this far, let’s go the rest of the way.”
“Okay,” Drake said.
The two men walked over to the bar. Mason slapped a five-dollar bill on the counter and said, “A couple of Old Fashioneds, and tell Bill Golding we want to talk with him.”
“Who does?” the bartender asked.
“We do.”
“Who are you?”
Mason slid one of his business cards across the moist mahogany bar. “Take that to him,” he said, “but don’t forget the Old Fashioneds.”
The bartender nodded, summoned a floorman and spoke to him in an undertone, his eyes on Mason and Drake. He handed the card to the floorman, who looked at it, scowled, and vanished through a door. The bartender mixed up the Old Fashioneds and was just serving them when the floorman returned and nodded at the bartender, then stationed himself by the door.
“Okay,” the bartender said, “Golding will see you.” He made change out of the five dollars. Mason said to Paul Drake, “Cover this end, Paul. Keep your eyes open.” He left his liquor and walked across the room. The floorman opened the door. Mason pushed his way through heavy green hangings and into an office. A man stared coldly at him from behind a desk. A woman, some years younger, her contours displayed by a clinging blue evening gown, stood near the corner of the desk. Her hair was glossy black and filled with highlights. Her full red lips held no smile. Her brilliant black eyes blazed with emotions she strove to suppress. Full-throated, well-nourished, she seemed seductively full of life, in striking contrast to the man who sat behind the desk, his waxy skin stretched so tightly across his prominent cheekbones that there hardly seemed enough left to cover the teeth, which showed in that ghastly grin seen on starving people. Against the pallor of his skin, just below where it crossed his cheekbones, were twin patches of brilliant coloring. His eyes were as dark as those of the woman, but where hers sparkled with vitality, his glittered feverishly.
“Sit down,” the man said in a husky voice.
Mason sat down on a leather davenport and crossed his long legs in front of him. In the seconds of silence which followed, it became apparent that the man was not going to introduce the woman, equally apparent that she did not intend to depart. Mason took his cigarette case from his pocket, glanced at the woman and asked, “Mind if I smoke?”
“On the contrary,” she said, “I’ll have one with you.”
She moved over to Mason’s side, the muscles of her well-developed figure sliding smoothly under the blue satin of her evening gown.
“Don’t get up,” she said.
Mason struck a match, and she steadied his hand in hers as she held the flame to the cigarette.
Bill Golding, behind the desk, husked, “Okay, what do you want?”
“Where are the stones you got from George Trent?” Mason asked.
The man behind the desk moved uneasily. The red patches of color on his cheeks intensified. “So,” he said, “you’re going to sing that song, are you?”
“Take it easy, Bill,” the woman remarked, seating herself beside Mason, her bare arm propped on the back of the davenport, her body so close that Mason could detect the faint scent of perfume behind her ears.
Golding said, “I didn’t get any stones from George Trent.”
“A couple of hours ago — perhaps three hours ago,” Mason went on, “Austin Cullens was up here.”
“I don’t know any Austin Cullens.”
“He’s a big man,” Mason said, “around six feet, somewhere in the forties, curly chestnut hair, a big diamond ring and a diamond scarf pin.”
“Haven’t seen him.”
“He’d have been up here, asking questions about George Trent and talking about redeeming gems Trent had left with you.”
“He hasn’t been here. No man like that has been in here.”
“I think he has,” Mason said calmly.
“I’m lying, is that it?”
Mason grinned mirthlessly. “Let’s say you’re mistaken,” he said.
“Well, I’m not lying and I’m not mistaken. The way you came in is the way out. You’d better start while you can still go under your own power.”
Mason said, “Nice radio you have there on your desk.”
“ I like it,” Golding said.
“Why not turn that switch,” Mason said, “and listen to some music?”
“I’m not demonstrating radios, thank you.”
“The reason I asked,” Mason went on, in a conversational voice, “is because I notice that it’s turned over to the short wave dial and the hand points to police calls. Perhaps you heard the announcement that Cullens had been murdered.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Golding said.
Mason maintained his calmly conversational tone. “Cullens stopped to telephone while he was on his way up here. Perhaps that will change the situation some.”
“You’re nuts!” Golding said.
“Of course,” Mason went on, “I can appreciate your position. Running a place of this kind, you’re not anxious to attract any publicity. With the police investigating the murder, you’d prefer to be dealt out.”
“Go on,” Golding said with a sneer, “you’re singing a solo. Don’t think I’m going to make it a duet.”
“Of course,” Mason remarked, “if you wanted to be friendly, we could talk things over. If you didn’t, I could telephone my friend, Sergeant Holcomb, on Homicide, and give him a tip. He’s accused me of holding out lately. This would square things a lot.”
“Go ahead,” Golding said. “See if I care. Telephone the whole damn force if you want to.”
“No,” Mason said casually, “Holcomb would be enough. He’d come up here and start asking questions — not only of you two, but of some of the customers in the front room. Perhaps they saw Cullens go in or come out.”
The man behind the desk stared straight ahead, with steady, expressionless eyes.
Mason laughed and said, “That hurt, didn’t it?”
Golding moistened his thin lips with the tip of his tongue. His eyes shifted uneasily to glance questioningly at the woman who sat at Mason’s side.
She said, in her full-toned, throaty voice, “All right, sweetheart, he’s got us.”
“He’s bluffing,” Golding said.
“He may be bluffing,” she retorted, “but he’s bluffing with the high hand.”
Mason, without taking his eyes from Golding, said over his shoulder, “Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me,” she told him. “Thank your luck. You’d better go out and play roulette. You’re getting the breaks tonight.”
Golding said, “All right, Mason, he came here. He said he wanted to see me. He came in and pulled that stuff about me having picked up some stones from George Trent. I told him he was nuts, that George Trent hadn’t been in here for two months. We argued for a while, and then he got up and went out.”
“That was all?” Mason asked.
“That was all.”
“That doesn’t coincide with the facts the way I have them,” Mason said.
“All right,” Golding told him, “suppose you tell your story.”
“Cullens,” Mason said, “found out that you had some stones that you’d picked up from Trent. He told you they didn’t belong to Trent. You had an argument about whether you could hold them if Trent didn’t have title to them. You had about six thousand tied up in them. Cullens offered to pay off half the indebtedness and take over the stones. You didn’t like that. So Cullens showed you you were in a spot because Trent didn’t own the stones. You didn’t want any lawsuits. You took the money and gave Cullens the stones. Cullens went out and someone bumped him off.”
“Where’d you get that pipe dream?” Golding asked.
“A little bird told me.”
Golding said, “They have open seasons on birds some times.”
“Do you make the game laws?”
“I might,” Golding said menacingly.
“Bill!” the woman exclaimed. “Shut up!”
Mason puffed at his cigarette. “Someone declared an open season on Cullens,” he said.
Golding started to say something. The woman screamed at him, “You shut up, Bill Golding. You talk too damn much!”
“Or not enough,” Mason said.
“Well, all he’s going to,” the woman insisted. “You’ve got our story — all of it.”
“That story,” Mason said, “doesn’t hold together.”
“Try and pull it apart,” Golding invited.
Mason said, “You were tipped off Cullens was killed. You decided it’d be fine if he hadn’t been here. You tipped off your employees. You didn’t figure you’d get such prompt action. When I came up and offered to have the homicide squad go through the customers in the place, you knew you were licked. So you decided to admit he’d been here, but swear that was all. You figure no one alive can contradict you.”
“That’s your story,” Golding said. “I’ve told mine and I’m sticking to it. You start pushing me around and I’ll make things hot for you.”
Mason laughed sarcastically and waved his hand in the general direction of the gambling room. “The way you’re organized,” he said, “you couldn’t make anything hot for anybody.”
The woman at Mason’s side leaned closer. “Why don’t you boys get along?” she asked.
“I’m willing to get along,” Mason said, “but I want the low-down.”
“All right, you’ve got it.”
“Were you here when Cullens was here?” Mason inquired, turning toward her.
“No.”
“Who was?”
“I don’t know. Was anyone else here, Billy?” she asked the man behind the desk.
His grin was triumphant. “No one.” he said, “just Cullens on that side of the desk and me on this.”
Mason got to his feet. “Okay,” he said casually, “if that’s the way you feel about it. Remember that you were the last person to see Cullens alive. If Cullens tried to get hard with you and make a squawk which would get you in trouble, there’s some chance you might have followed him and bumped him off.”
Golding’s face became distorted with rage. “If I bumped him off,” he said, “I did it with a six-shooter.”
“Meaning what?” Mason asked.
“Meaning there’d be five more...” The woman started for the desk, her eyes blazing.
Bill Golding’s face suddenly became an expressionless mask. The woman said thickly, “That’s all of it. It won’t do you any good to stick around. The party’s over.”
Mason said, “Rather nice hooch you serve out there, Golding.”
“It wouldn’t have been so good if I’d known who they were getting it for,” Golding snapped.
Mason said, “That line isn’t going to get you anywhere.”
The lawyer marched through the door, picked up Drake in the casino and went down the stairs, and out through the restaurant. “Now what?” Drake asked.
Mason said, “Cullens was here — they’re not talking. Call your office, Paul. Shoot two or three men down here. Sew this place up tight. I want Golding and the woman tailed when they leave, and I want the names of some of the customers who were up there, to use as witnesses.”
Drake said, “Hell, Perry, we can’t go busting into a place like that and ask the people who...”
“Watch the customers as they come out,” Mason said. “Follow them to their automobiles and get the license numbers.”
“They won’t talk,” the detective objected. “Once they get home, they’ll swear they never even heard of the joint.”
“Be your age, Paul,” the lawyer said impatiently. “Pick the prosperous guys who are with the flashy wrens about half their ages. Those birds will do anything to avoid publicity. You get them staked out and I’ll do the questioning. Let them tell me they never heard of the joint, and I’ll read ‘em a riot act.”
Drake said, “Yes, I guess we could do that.”
“Well, get started,” Mason told him. “And, while you’re about it, tell your outfit to look up an Lone Bedford, who’s a friend of Austin Cullens. Get all the dope on her. Have one of your men tell Harry Diggers he’s representing an insurance company and get a written statement out of Diggers. Get an inventory of the stuff that was in that handbag Mrs. Breel was carrying.”
“Okay,” Drake said, “I’ll get started. I can get some operatives who know Bill Golding and Eva Tannis. That’ll release me so I can go back to the office and direct things from there.”
“I’ll watch the place while you telephone,” Mason told him. “Make it snappy.”
Drake nodded and walked to the corner, where he telephoned his office from a cigar store. When he returned, Mason said, “Okay, Paul, I’m on my way. Keep this place sewed up.”
Drake nodded, fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette and said, “It’s sewed, Perry.”