Mason rang Paul Drake’s office. “Any messages for me?” he asked.
“Yes, Mr. Mason. Your secretary said to call her at the Green Room of the Maxine Hotel. She said it was important.”
“Anything else?” Mason asked.
“Drake just came in. He wants to talk with you.”
Mason heard the click of the connection and then Paul Drake’s voice on the line. “What’s the commotion down at Homicide, Perry?”
Mason said, “I dug up another body for them.”
“ You did!”
“Uh-huh.”
“ That’s a break,” Drake told him.
“What is?”
“That I wasn’t with you. Who’s the body, Perry?”
“George Trent.”
Mason heard Drake’s whistle of surprise. “Where was it?” the detective asked.
“In a packing case in his workshop. What had you been able to find out about him, Paul? Anything?”
“Just a description. I have men out looking for him. I’ll call them in “
“Did you have a good description?”
“Yes. Fifty-two years old, six feet tall, two hundred and ten pounds, brown hair, brown eyes... Tell me, Perry, are you certain it’s George Trent?”
“Reasonably so,” Mason said. “The niece had hysterics. The janitor identified him. The body had been jammed into a packing case. I wanted to look around some, but Holcomb kicked me out. He wanted to work on the girl while she was still hysterical. What else, Paul?”
“I have a couple of likely prospects my men picked up coming out of The Golden Platter. I’m breaking license numbers down into names and addresses.”
“Get anything on Lone Bedford?” Mason asked.
Drake said, “She’s at the Green Room of the Maxine Hotel with Della right now, Perry.”
“Okay,” Mason said, “Take advantage of her being there to have a man frisk her apartment. See what he can dig up.”
“Right,” Drake said. “They’ve moved Sarah Breel — came to the conclusion her skull wasn’t fractured after all.”
“Where did they move her?” Mason asked.
“The Dearborn Memorial Hospital.”
“Was she conscious?” Mason asked.
“I gathered not, but aside from possible internal injuries, they’ve figured it down to a broken leg and a concussion. How about Trent, Perry? What killed him?”
“Apparently a bullet,” Mason said. “Incidentally, there was a thirty-eight caliber revolver in the upper right-hand drawer of the desk in Trent’s office. That may or may not be significant. There was also a bottle of whiskey in the drawer. I’d been feeding whiskey to the niece and told Holcomb about the bottle. He pulled out the drawer a little farther than I had and got a glimpse of the gun.”
“I’ll get men on the job and see what I can find out,” Drake said. “Della wants you to call her.”
“I’m calling,” Mason told him.
He hung up the telephone, dialed the Maxine Hotel, asked for the Green Room and had Della Street paged. A few moments later her voice, a bit higher-pitched than usual, said, “How long does this keep up, Chief?”
“What keep up?” he asked.
“You know,” she told him, and giggled.
“You mean following instructions with Lone Bedford?”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t know,” Mason said, “perhaps not much longer. Why?”
“The girl has ideas,” Della Street said.
“Such as what?” Mason asked.
“Such as what we’re doing now.”
“And what are you doing now?”
“Putting drinks on the expense account,” she told him.
“Stay with it,” Mason told her. “The expense account can stand it.” Della Street hiccoughed into the telephone. Mason couldn’t tell whether she was joking or if the hiccough were genuine.
“Pardon me,” she said with dignity. “Somethin’ I ate... Maybe the expense account can stand it, but I can’t.”
“Hold everything,” Mason told her, “I’m coming up.”
“You’ve heard about the music, haven’t you, Chief?”
“What about the music?”
“Goes round ‘n round,” Della Street said, and hung up.
Mason drove to the Maxine, entered the Green Room, and found Della Street, Lone Bedford and three men sitting at a table. Mason tried to make the meeting appear casual. “Well, well, well,” he said, “what have we here?... And, Mrs. Bedford. This is indeed a pleasure.”
Lone Bedford grinned up at him. “Are you,” she asked, “telling me?”
“Sit down, Chief,” Della Street said. “We can always crowd in one more chair.”
“It’s your secretary’s birthday,” Mrs. Bedford explained.
A waiter brought up a chair. Mason sat down at the table. The men nodded to him without enthusiasm. No one performed any introductions. Della Street fidgeted about in her seat, looking around for the waiter. “Well,” she said, “I’ve just about reached my capacity. I’d better pay my check and get out.” She opened her purse, fumbled in the interior, opened a coin purse, and her face showed consternation. “Good gosh!” she said. “I came away without my billfold, just my coin purse.”
Mason started to reach for his pocket, but checked himself as Della Street kicked his shins under the table. Dance music started. One of the men said, “You’ll excuse me, I’m dancing this one with a girl from San Francisco.” Della Street caught the waiter’s eye. Mason heard the scraping of chairs in a general exodus. Della Street grinned delightedly and pulled a roll of bills from her purse.
Mrs. Bedford said, “Now, was that nice.”
“I had to get rid of them some way,” Della said, “The boss wants lo talk business.”
“Who were they?” Mason asked.
“Just table lizards,” Della Street said. “They come over and dance, and drink and go away, and come back. It’s a racket, you know, circulating around and looking ‘em over, but not getting stuck for anything.” She returned the bills to her purse.
“You could have been more tactful about it,” Lone Bedford said to Della Street. “One of the men hadn’t had a chance to ask for my telephone number yet.” She giggled.
Mason said, “That’s what comes of letting you two girls get on the loose. Come on, Della, we’re going places.”
The waiter moved over to the table. “Something?” he asked.
“Yes,” Della Street said, “my check.” She fumbled around in her purse. “I just can’t find those bills,” she said. “I guess I came away without them.”
The waiter gravely slid the check over in front of Perry Mason. Mason grinned, pulled his billfold from his pocket, left a twenty-dollar bill on top of the check, looked at the amount of the check again and said to the waiter, “The change will just about make up your tip.”
The waiter bowed thanks. Lone Bedford said, “Where’re we going?”
“Down to the police station,” Mason said.
“The police station!”
“Uh-huh. There are some diamonds down there I want you to identify.”
“My diamonds?”
“I think so... Just a minute, I have to put in a phone call first.”
“Well, I can use a little powder,” Mrs. Bedford told him, “and by the time we get our coats and our noses powdered, you should be finished with your telephoning. Come on, Della, and give me moral support.”
Mason called Drake’s office “Now listen, Paul,” he said, “this is important, Lone Bedford, Della Street and I are going down to police headquarters. I’m going to try to get a look at those diamonds. Then I’m going to make a few comments and turn Mrs. Bedford loose. I want to know where she goes and what she does after she leaves headquarters. I want you to have men there who know me and know Della. They’ll see us go in and that will put the finger on Mrs. Bedford. She may go out alone.”
“Okay,” Drake said, “I’ll have the men on the job.”
Mason hung up, loitered around the checking counter until the girls emerged from the restroom. He helped them on with their coats, tipped the attendant, and led the way toward his car. “What makes you think they’re my diamonds?” Mrs. Bedford asked.
“I don’t,” Mason said. “I just want you to look at them.”
“Where were they discovered, and how do they happen to be at police headquarters?”
“Mrs. Breel,” Mason said, “was hit by a motorist. She was taken to the emergency hospital. Among other things which were found in her bag, were these diamonds, done up in paper.”
“But they couldn’t have been my diamonds,” Mrs. Bedford said, “because Aussie was getting those diamonds from The Golden i Platter.”
“Did he,” Mason asked casually, “telephone you to say he had the diamonds?”
“Not after that first time. He said he’d located them, that they’d been hocked for six thousand, and he could get them for three. I told him to pay the three thousand.”
Mason said, “You’ll pardon me, Mrs. Bedford, if I seem to hold out on you, but there’s one angle of this case that I’d prefer not to comment on until after you’ve seen the diamonds.”
She nudged him playfully and said, “Go on, Big Boy, be mysterious. I like it.”
Della Street said, “You should know, Chief, that you mustn’t be so serious on my birthday. The trouble with you is you’re cold when you’re sober.”
Mason glanced surreptitiously at his wrist watch. “Well,” he said, “it’s not an incurable disease.”
Della Street surveyed him with exaggerated gravity. “Yes,” she said, “in your case it is. You’re working. You might hoist a drink or two, but it would run off your back like water off a duck’s stomach.” Lone Bedford laughed gleefully. Della Street turned on her reproachfully. “I didn’t say that accidentally,” she said. “I said it on purpose. It was a wisecrack.”
“I know it, dearie. That’s why I laughed.”
Della Street said, “No, one woman doesn’t laugh that way at another woman’s wisecracks — not when there’s a man in the party. She laughs courteously and politely. You didn’t laugh politely. You thought I was trying to say that his drinks ran off his back... Oh, skip it. It isn’t important. Who wants to waste drinks on a duck’s back?”
Lone Bedford said to Mason, “Your secretary is younger than I thought she was.”
“Indeed,” Mason said.
Della Street laughed. “What she’s getting at is that I’m too inexperienced in holding my birthdays down to have seen many of them.”
Lone Bedford said, “After all, my dear, you’ve only had five or six highballs.”
Della Street let her eyes get large and round, as she looked up at Perry Mason. “Imagine,” she said, “being so calloused that one can use the word ‘only’ in connection with five or six highballs.”
Mason said, “Well, it sounds as though it had been a perfectly gorgeous birthday.”
“Don’t use the past tense,” Lone told him. “Her birthday isn’t over until midnight. And now that you’ve put in an appearance, we’re filled with new ideas for celebrating... That reminds me, I have to put in a call myself. I’ll only be a minute.”
She made a dive for the telephone booth, and was careful to pull the door tightly shut. Mason said to Della Street, “Have any idea whom she’s calling, Della?”
“No.”
“What’s the idea of the party?” Mason asked.
She grinned and said, “The woman was plying me with drinks, and trying to get me to talk. I didn’t know how long it’d be before you showed up, so I pretended I was feeling the effects.”
“How much of it,” Mason asked, “is pretense?”
She gave the matter the benefit of frowning consideration, said, “About fifty percent of it is genuine, Chief,” then hiccoughed and said, “Well, perhaps you’d better make it seventy-five percent,” and laughed.
Lone Bedford emerged from the telephone booth, sailed up to Mason, linked her arm through his and said, “Okay, let’s go places. Can we get a drink at police headquarters?”
“That,” he told her, “remains to be seen.” He led the way to his car and drove to police headquarters, while the two girls, in high spirits, made hilarious comment on the cars they passed, the electric signs, and such other matters as came to their attention. At police headquarters, the property clerk regarded Mason with frowning suspicion. Mason indicated Lone Bedford. “Mrs. Bedford,” he said, “left some diamonds with Austin Cullens to give to George Trent. There’s some possibility that the diamonds found in Mrs. Breel’s handbag may be the Bedford diamonds.”
“So what?” the man behind the cage asked.
“I wanted to see if Mrs. Bedford could identify them,” Mason said.
The man said, “Just a minute,” picked up a telephone which had a device clamped on the mouthpiece making his conversation inaudible. He talked for some two or three minutes, then turned from the phone to Mason.” What’d you say her name was?”
“Mrs. Bedford, Lone Bedford.”
The man returned the telephone to his lips, there followed additional conversation, then he nodded, hung up the telephone, and moved over to the vault. He brought out Mrs. Breel’s bag, took the tissue-covered jewelry from the bottom, placed the pieces on the counter, and unwrapped the tissue. Mrs. Bedford, her hilarity completely dissipated, watched the paper coverings being removed with eyes which were narrowed in scrutiny. “No,” she said slowly, as the diamonds came to view, “those aren’t mine.”
“You’re certain?” Mason asked.
She nodded, then turned to face him. “I never saw them before in my life,” she said. “They’re somewhat similar to my pieces, but they’re not mine.”
“That’s all,” Mason told her. “Thanks.”
The property clerk carefully rewrapped each of the diamonds. “How did it happen Mrs. Breel was carrying those stones around in her handbag?” Mrs. Bedford asked. “They’re worth money.”
“That,” Mason told her, “is something we don’t know. Mrs. Breel stepped out from the curb, apparently right in front of an automobile, it was out on St. Rupert Boulevard between Ninety-First and Ninety-Second Streets and...”
“What was she doing out there?” Lone Bedford interrupted, her voice suddenly hard.
“I don’t know,” Mason said. “No one knows. Of course, with the finding of Cullens’ body, the police think...”
“With the finding of what? ”
Mason looked at her in surprise. “Why, don’t you know?” he said.
“Know what?” she inquired, seeming to bite the ends off the words as she uttered them.
Mason said, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I thought you knew.”
“Go on, out with it.”
“Austin Cullens was shot sometime this evening. The police found his body lying on the living room floor of his house.”
Lone Bedford stood rigidly motionless. Della Street said to Perry Mason, “Why, Chief, why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought I had told you.” She shook her head. “Things have been so frightfully mixed up tonight,” Mason apologized, “that I haven’t been certain... I’m very sorry if this comes as a shock to you, Mrs. Bedford. You’d known him a long time, I believe?”
She suddenly turned to Della Street. There was cold suspicion in her eyes. “All right. You two go ahead and celebrate Della Street’s birthday. I’m finished.”
“Is there,” Mason said, “some place I can take you? Remember, I have a car.”
“No,” she said, striding toward the door.
As the door slammed shut, Della Street said reproachfully, “After all, Chief, that was cruel. She may have cared for him a lot.”
“That,” Mason said, “was exactly what I wanted to find out.”