Paul Drake, his face gray with fatigue and worry, looked across the desk at Perry Mason, and said, “Some day when you play me for a sucker, I’m going to wriggle off the hook.”
The lawyer raised his eyebrows. “Why, Paul, what’s the idea?”
“You know darn well what the idea is,” Drake said.
“You mean piling so much work on you I kept you up all night?” Mason asked. “Shucks, think of me. I was pulled out of bed around one o’clock in the morning to go out on a wild-goose chase.”
Drake said, “And I suppose you haven’t heard anything at all about the wild goose?”
Mason said, “Spill it. What’s on your mind, Paul?”
Drake said sarcastically, “Oh, no, you don’t know what it’s all about. You haven’t the faintest idea. You wouldn’t have got me in a jam for worlds.”
“What the devil are you talking about, Paul?”
“Why didn’t you telephone me?”
“When?”
“When! When you said you were going to.”
“Why, did I say...”
“How about that date to go out and save your bacon at Hillgrade Avenue if you didn’t call inside of an hour?”
Mason said, “I had some trouble, Paul. I was talking with a witness. I couldn’t break away to get to a telephone without jeopardizing the whole thing. And after all, it only meant a trip out to Hillgrade Avenue for you. That was only a matter of twenty minutes, and it was better to send you on a wild-goose chase than to jeopardize what I was working on.”
“Oh, yes, a wild-goose chase,” Drake said. “I see.”
“Well,” Mason said, “that was the way it looked to me. House standing there, gloomy and sedate, with a light or two in it, but no one to answer the doorbell.”
“And the doors all unlocked and waiting for you to go right on in?” Drake asked.
Mason shook his head. “Not me.”
“Why not?”
“Be your age, Paul. Somebody rings you up at one o’clock, tells you to go to a certain address, and walk right into a house you’ve never seen before. You go blundering on in. Someone comes out with a double-barreled shotgun, says, ‘Burglars, eh,’ and lets you have both loads of buckshot right in the middle of your stomach. No, thank you. None of that in mine. They answer bells or I don’t open doors.”
“You mean to say you didn’t go in?”
“I mean to say I don’t make a practice of having strangers tell me to go out to some residence and walk right in. But what are you crabbing about? You had a wild-goose chase out there, and that was all. You got back in twenty or thirty minutes. You found out that I wasn’t there. You knew I’d either been kidnaped, or was working on some new angle of the case.”
Drake said sarcastically, “Oh, yes. It’s nothing to me, just the few minutes necessary to run out there and back.”
“Well, what are you beefing about?” Mason asked, letting a note of impatience creep into his voice.
Drake said, “I don’t suppose you went inside. I don’t suppose you found the body and didn’t want to take the responsibility of telephoning the police and trying to explain to them how it happened you were out there. I don’t suppose you decided you’d discovered enough bodies and that it would be a smart idea to let Paul Drake take the rap on this one. You knew damn well I’d have some hard-boiled detectives on my staff who would bust right on into that house. You knew damn well I’d find the corpse, and when I found it, I’d have to telephone the police.”
Mason said, “What body?”
“Oh, I don’t suppose you knew there was a body in the house?”
“What about the body? Who was it?”
“Apparently,” Drake said, “it’s the body of Mrs. Sarah Perlin, the housekeeper for Hocksley. She may have committed suicide, and she may have been shot.”
Mason said excitedly, “You mean she was actually in that house?”
“Of course, she was in that house, in a bedroom in front of her dressing table. After the shot had been fired, she’d slumped down on the floor. Her own gun did the job.”
Mason’s face held an expression of puzzled surprise. “Paul, you’re not kidding me about this? You mean she was there?”
“Of course, she was there.”
“And that’s who it was? What I mean is, the body’s been identified?”
Drake nodded.
“Then she must have been killed after she telephoned me and... Gosh, Paul, she said she wanted to confess. She must have telephoned me then started getting ready to meet me. The thought of what she’d done began preying on her mind, and she decided on suicide. What is there that indicates it wasn’t a suicide?”
“The course of the bullet, and position of the body,” Drake said.
“Tell me what happened, Paul.”
“I waited for you to telephone. At first I didn’t think very much of it. Just a matter of routine. Then when about forty-five minutes had gone by and you hadn’t phoned, I began to worry. After all, it could pretty easily have been a trap. You work on a case in an unorthodox manner. You keep two or three jumps ahead of the police. You’re usually pretty close to the murderer. A man who was being crowded could bump you off, and, by shutting your lips, might save himself a one-way trip to the gas chamber at San Quentin. One o’clock in the morning was a hell of a time to be calling a lawyer out of bed. The more I thought of it, the less I liked it. I rounded up a couple of tough operatives and sat here with my eye glued on the clock. Somehow, I had a feeling in my bones you weren’t going to call. I wanted to get started. I felt that seconds were precious, but you’d said an hour, so I decided to give you the full hour.
“Believe me, boy, when the second hand on that electric clock swung around to the sixtieth minute, I was on my way. And maybe you don’t think we burnt up the roads getting out to Hillgrade.”
“Good boy,” Mason said. “I knew I could count on you. Then what happened?”
Drake said, “I didn’t even bother to waste any time sizing up the lay of the land. I got to six-o-four East Hillgrade and saw lights in the house. I slammed the car to a stop right in front of the house, jumped out, and the three of us ran up the steps to the front porch and started jabbing the bell button. I could hear the doorbell jangling on the inside of the house, but nothing happened. So I pushed the door open. It was unlocked. We went in. You know what I found.”
Mason shook his head. “What did you find, Paul?”
Drake said, “There was a reception corridor with an arched entrance into a living room, and back of that a dining room and kitchen. Over on the other side was a door which led to a hallway. A light was on in the hallway, and the bedroom door was open. I was the one who walked down the hallway while the other boys took the living room and dining room. Believe me, I had my gun where I could reach it right quick. Okay, I get down to the second bedroom door. It’s open. I take a look inside. I see the top of a woman’s head, gray hair sprawled out over the floor. I see a left arm stretched out, and a right hand holding a gun. I let out a yell for the other boys, then I go over and make sure she’s dead. Then we go through the house looking for you. By that time, my gun’s out, and I’m having the jitters.
“We can’t find any trace of you anywhere, so I find a telephone and call the police and tell them to rush me out some radio officers and also to notify Homicide.”
“Mention my name?”
“No. I didn’t see where that would do any good. I knew they’d look things over pretty thoroughly. At the time, I thought it was suicide.”
“You don’t think so now?”
“I’m darned if I know what to think now. I’m beginning to swing over toward the murder theory.”
“What did the police say?”
“They wanted to know how I happened to go walking into the house at that time in the morning, and how I happened to find the body.”
“What did you tell them?”
Drake said apologetically, “I only had four or five minutes after I telephoned headquarters before the radio officers showed up. I didn’t have time to think up an absolutely iron-clad story. I could have improved it if I’d had a little more time. I...”
“What was it?” Mason asked.
“I couldn’t be absolutely certain who she was. Looking at things fast, it looked like an open-and-shut case of suicide. So I told the cops that I’d got a telephone message from a woman who said she wanted to tell me something before it was too late, that if I’d jump in my car and get out to that address fast, I’d find out something in connection with the Hocksley murder that would interest me.”
Mason grinned. “You couldn’t have done any better than that if you’d tried all night, Paul.”
Drake shook his head. “You overlook the weak point in it”
“What?”
“I didn’t see how I could tell them I’d stalled around very long after getting that telephone call. I didn’t know just when she’d pulled the trigger, but I surmised it had to be after she’d talked with you on the telephone. That would mean a medical examination would show she’d been dead for perhaps as much as an hour before I’d notified the cops. That wouldn’t look so well. So I told the cops I was working on something at the time which kept me from leaving the office, that I’d told her I’d be right out, but had put my car in the garage and there’d be a little delay. I felt that that way I could stall her along. That’s what I told the cops.”
“Go ahead,” Mason said.
“They wanted to know how long it was after the telephone conversation before I got there. I told them it might have been an hour, and I could see they didn’t believe that. They said that if I’d been on the track of something as important as that sounded, I’d have got out there sooner.”
“So then what?” Mason asked.
“So I told them that I hadn’t paid too much attention to time, that it had seemed quite a long while to me because I had so much to do, but that it might have been less than an hour; perhaps forty-five minutes, or perhaps even half an hour. And then I got myself in a jack pot. The times were all wet.”
Mason frowned. “You mean,” he said, “that she had been dead for more than...”
“She’d been dead ever since midnight,” Drake said, “and probably before.”
“How do they know?”
“Taking the temperature of the room and the temperature of the body and estimating how long it takes a body to lose a degree of heat, and all that stuff,” Drake said.
Mason frowned. “It couldn’t have been midnight. She talked with me over the telephone.”
“That’s what I thought,” Drake said, “but I wasn’t in a position to do any arguing.”
Mason said, “I guess that’s it, Paul.”
“What?”
“She was killed around midnight. That makes it murder.”
“But she talked with you and...”
“No,” Mason said. “A woman talked with me, a woman who had a rather well-bred voice. That is, the tones were smoothly harmonious, but there was something wrong with the way she spoke, as though she had a marble in her mouth. That explains it.”
“Explains what?” Drake asked.
Mason said, “It was a woman who talked with me. This woman said she was Mrs. Perlin. It was a cinch to pull that on me because I’d never heard Mrs. Perlin speak and didn’t know her voice. But the one who called the other person was one who said she was speaking for Mrs. Perlin because she was unable to come to the phone.”
“What other person?” Drake asked.
Mason said, “Right at the moment, Paul, that’s neither here nor there.”
The detective looked at him, sighed, and said, “It’s probably there, but it sure as hell ain’t here.”
Mason said, “When I looked down at the body, it didn’t seem to me that she’d been a woman who would have had a voice such as the one I’d heard on the telephone. So I asked — this other party — if the housekeeper had been up in the world at one time, and then had some bad luck. Had to go to housekeeping. That would have accounted for the well-bred voice, you know.”
“What was the answer?”
“Negative.”
Drake lit a cigarette. “That means,” he said, “that the party who was with you was someone who knew the housekeeper pretty well, someone who knew the housekeeper’s past, someone who was interested in the Hocksley case because a message brought that person out there. Probably a girl. Give me one guess, Perry.”
“Don’t take it,” Mason warned.
Drake removed the cigarette from his mouth, blew smoke at the smoldering end. “I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you, Perry, but there’s just a chance you and some feminine accomplice could be nominated for a murder rap. You might even be elected.”
“If the woman died before midnight?” Mason asked.
“That’s what you say.”
“I ought to know.”
Drake said, “If you’re going to keep messing around in murder cases, you’d better get married — so you’ll have some corroboration when it comes to bedtime alibis.”
“What the deuce are you talking about?” Mason said irritably. “Why the devil should I need an alibi?”
“Darned if I know,” Drake said, “but I have a hunch Lieutenant Tragg is going to become very inquisitive about what you were doing last night.”
“Tragg doesn’t even know I was anywhere within a mile of Hillgrade Avenue.”
Drake said, “Tragg gets around.”
Mason pushed back his chair. “You’ve been up all night, Paul. It gives you a pessimistic outlook.”
Drake regarded him moodily. He said, “You’re always pulling fast ones, and then expecting me to back your plays without telling me what it’s all about. I’m warning you that if Lieutenant Tragg finds out you were out at Hillgrade Avenue last night, or if he finds out the real reason why you didn’t call me back inside of an hour·, you’re going to have trouble.”
“What is the real reason I didn’t call you back inside of an hour?” Mason asked.
Drake regarded the lawyer thoughtfully. “If it’s what I think it is, I hope I’m not right.”
Mason laughed. “Come on. Out with it.”
Drake held up his left hand with the fingers extended. With the forefinger of his right hand, he checked off the points as he made them. “First,” he said, “you aren’t kidding me a bit. The reason you didn’t call me was because something very important did turn up. Two, that something important was of a nature which would interfere with a telephone call. Three, you didn’t discover anything from that contact which was particularly new. Otherwise, you’d have passed along the information, so I’d have something to work on. Four, it was a contact which knew a lot about the housekeeper, but one you had to keep absolutely dark. Five, it put you in such a spot that you don’t dare to confide even in me. You’re trying to kid me out of it. Now then, what’s the answer to those five points?”
Mason said, “I’ll bite, Mr. Bones. What is the answer to those five points?”
“Opal Sunley,” Drake said.
Mason got up. “I warned you not to make that guess, Paul. I try to keep you out in the clear and you jump right into the middle of the fire.”
Drake grinned. “I was in the frying pan, anyway,” he said.