Perry Mason, sitting at the corner table in the Home Kitchen Cafe, surveyed the restaurant in shrewd appraisal.
A sign announced that the restaurant opened at seven o’clock A.M. and closed at seven-thirty P.M. Placards, placed on the wall, listed a series of tempting breakfast combinations. Particular inducements were made to secure regular patronage.
There was a lunch counter running half the length of the restaurant on one side. At the front end of this was a well-stocked cigar counter and a large cash register presided over by a genial, fat man whose lips were held in a good-natured grin of easy affability. His bald head shone like a freshly peeled onion in the light reflected from the plate-glass window at the front of the restaurant. His eyes were quick, and keen as those of a hawk.
Opposite the lunch counter were tables capable of seating four, and along the wall were a number of booths. Fast-moving, capable waitresses in clean, starched dresses darted swiftly about. Everywhere was an atmosphere of well-oiled, clock-like efficiency.
A waitress approached Mason to take his order. The lawyer smiled, handed her two one-dollar bills, and said, “I’m giving you the tip before I eat. I’m waiting for a party. Do you happen to know a man named Serle?”
She hesitated over taking the tip.
“A tall, thin chap around forty,” Mason said.
Again she shook her head.
“He’s friendly with a waitress named Hazel.”
“Oh, I know the man you mean.”
“If he comes in for lunch,” Mason said, “tell him that Perry Mason, the lawyer, wants to see him and point me out to him.”
“Is that all?” she asked.
Mason said, “That’s all.”
She took the two dollars, and said, somewhat dubiously, “Suppose he doesn’t want to see you?”
“Then,” Mason said with a grin, “I’ll see him.”
She smiled and left him.
Not more than ten minutes later, Mason saw a man who answered Serle’s description enter the restaurant, nod to the proprietor, and start for a table. The waitress whom Mason had tipped glided swiftly toward him. Mason, turning his profile, devoted himself to a cigarette. A few seconds later, he turned around — casually.
Guy T. Serle was approaching his table.
Mason nodded without eagerness and indicated a chair with a wave of his hand.
“So you’re Mason,” Serle said, his eyes showing quick interest. “I’ve heard about you... I don’t need a mouthpiece.”
“I don’t solicit business,” Mason told him.
Quick comprehension showed in Serle’s eyes. “And I’m not talking about that other matter,” he said.
“Why not?” Mason asked.
“I’m a witness for the prosecution.”
“That doesn’t keep one from telling the facts.”
“It does me.”
“Been ordered not to talk?” Mason asked.
Serle shrugged his shoulders, caught the eye of a waitress, and beckoned to her. As she crossed over to the table, Serle asked, “Where’s Hazel?”
She said, “Hazel’s not here today.”
Serle frowned. “Her day off?” he asked.
The waitress shook her head.
“Well, where is she?” Serle demanded.
“I don’t know. I guess she’s gone. It was her morning to open up. She didn’t show, and the boss got sore. I wasn’t supposed to come on until eleven, and he got me up out of my beauty sleep. He telephoned Hazel’s rooming house, and they said she’d left before midnight last night, took a suitcase with her, and beat it.”
“Beat it?” Serle echoed.
“Uh-huh — and her room rent’s paid up until the first, and today’s payday. She has a week’s wages coming — fat chance she stands of getting them now. What’s your order?”
“Lunch,” Serle said shortly.
Placing silverware, a butter dish, and a glass of water before Serle, she glanced at the place which had been set in front of Mason at the table, and asked, “How about you? Ready to give your order now?”
Mason nodded. She handed him a menu, and Serle said, “If you want some good eats, just order lunch.”
Mason smiled. “Just bring me the lunch.”
When the waitress had left, Mason said, conversationally, “What were you and Milicant talking about?”
“Milicant?” Serle repeated questioningly. “Oh, yes, I keep forgetting his name was Milicant. I knew him as Louie Conway.”
“What were you talking about?” Mason asked.
Serle said, “Listen, Mason, I’m not foolish enough to talk my way into the cooler.”
Mason said, “The D.A. can’t square your rap.”
“I’ll take a chance,” Serle said. “Anyway, they have nothing on me. I have a legitimate business. I don’t know whether the people who buy stuff I sell are stage magicians or whether they intend to start gambling. I always warn them it’s a crime to introduce fraud into a gambling game. That lets me out. I’ve done my duty.”
“How about the lottery?” Mason asked.
“There wasn’t any lottery. I don’t know where you heard that.”
“The D.A. can’t square a federal rap.”
“What are you leading up to?”
“Where a man writes a letter and says, ‘I can’t deliver you the stuff you ordered by mail, but you’ll get it by special messenger,’ it’s the same as using the mails in the business.”
The waitress appeared with two bowls of pearl barley soup.
“What did you mean by that last crack?” Serle asked.
“Nothing,” Mason said, munching a cracker.
“Listen, Mason,” Serle said. “Get me straight on this. That lottery business is the bunk. I was closed up on a tip-off. It was a grudge tip-off. The D.A. doesn’t go for that stuff. He doesn’t use his office to settle private grudges. What’s more, you can’t convict a man on a tip-off. You’ve got to have evidence.”
“That’s right,” Mason agreed.
There was another long silence while Mason finished his soup. Serle watched him uneasily. Mason pushed the plate away and said, “Nice soup.”
Serle said, “Understand this, Mason, I don’t think Leeds killed him, but the D.A. thinks so, and the D.A. has a case so airtight you couldn’t punch a hole in it with a drill.”
“What makes it airtight?” Mason asked.
Serle said, “I’m not talking.”
“Is that the price you had to pay for squaring the rap with the D.A.?” Mason asked.
Serle said, “There isn’t any rap.”
The waitress brought a fruit salad, a plate of delicious meat pie made with tender squares of meat, rich, yellow carrots, new potatoes, walnut-sized onions, and steaming gravy.
“Certainly is fine grub,” Mason said, appreciatively inhaling the aroma of the food.
“Look here,” Serle said, “I’m not supposed to do any talking to anyone, newspapermen or anyone.”
“In return for having that lottery business squared?” Mason asked.
“Quit harping about that,” Serle said irritably. “There isn’t any evidence on the sale of any lottery tickets.”
Mason said, “If you don’t mind, Serle, I’m going to sop this bread in the gravy. Certainly has a wonderful flavor. Are all their dishes this good?”
“They specialize in home cooking. Look here, Mason, you can’t pull this stuff with me.”
“What stuff?” Mason asked.
“Trying to shake me down. Hell, don’t think I was born yesterday. All I’ve got to do is to step over to that phone, ring the district attorney, and tell him the defense lawyer is trying to tamper with one of his witnesses, and they’ll have you on the spot so fast you won’t have a chance to finish your dinner.”
Mason gravely handed him a dime. “There’s the phone,” he said. “Hop to it.”
“I’m not that kind,” Serle said. “I don’t squeal.”
Mason said, “Of course, if the district attorney wanted actual proof, I could see that he had the lottery ticket and the crooked crap dice which you delivered for twenty-five bucks to Paul Drake.”
Serle, who had been about to attack his meat pie, paused with the fork poised over the plate. “What the hell are you trying to pull?” he asked.
Mason speared a carrot, cut a corner from the rich crust of the pie, and conveyed it to his mouth. After watching Serle, Mason said, “Drake’s the head of the Drake Detective Agency. He was working for me.”
Serle said, “Oh,” tonelessly.
“We were trying to locate Conway,” Mason said. “We found out about the Conway Appliance Company, but it had moved. We couldn’t get the post office to kick loose with a forwarding address so we sent twenty-five bucks on a chance. The chance paid off.” He returned to his meat pie.
“Look here,” Serle said abruptly, “what do you want?”
“The low-down,” Mason said.
Serle pushed back his plate. “I’ll have to call a party,” he said.
“Someone at the D.A.’s office?” Mason asked.
“No.”
“Who?”
“Just a party.”
“Go ahead and call,” Mason said.
Serle was closeted in the telephone booth for nearly ten minutes. “All right, Mason,” he said, returning to the table, “I have a free hand.”
Mason smiled. “So have I.”
Serle sat down. “Look here, Mason. Suppose I give you a break in this thing. What’s in it for me?”
Mason said, “I’ll let you pay my luncheon check.”
Serle frowned, and said, “I’m not kidding.”
“Neither am I.”
“All right then, you had your chance and you’ve lost it.” Serle attacked his half-cold meat pie with savage haste.
Mason finished his salad, cleaned up his plate, lit a cigarette, and sipped coffee.
“Dessert?” the waitress asked.
“Bring me ice cream,” Mason said, “and the check to him,” indicating Serle.
Serle scraped his plate and pushed it back with a gesture of irritation.
“Your food won’t agree with you eating hastily that way,” Mason cautioned.
Serle said, “This is a hell of a way to act. I had to talk my head off in order to get a free hand, and now you start getting hard.”
Mason said, “I’m always hard,” and moved back to let the waitress scrape crumbs from the tablecloth.
Serle said, in a surly voice, “Bring me apple pie a la mode, and lots of coffee.”
“Yes, sir,” the waitress said and moved away.
Mason hitched his chair around so he was sitting sideways to the table, crossed his long legs, and smoked with every evidence of enjoyment.
“You couldn’t drag that in on cross-examination anyway,” Serle said.
“Oh, you’d be surprised at what a good lawyer can do on cross-examination,” Mason observed affably. “You can ask a man a lot of embarrassing questions. You can impeach his veracity. You can show that he’s been convicted of a felony and...”
“Well, I haven’t been convicted of any felony,” Serle snapped.
“No,” Mason told him with a smile, “but you could be before the case came to trial. The federal men work fast, and murder cases usually drag along... particularly when a lawyer has some reason for dragging ’em along.”
Serle said, with a burst of temper, “I smelled a rat on the Drake remittance right after we’d made delivery. I’d just taken over the business. I didn’t know all of the customers. He wrote a letter which led me to believe...” His voice trailed away into sulky silence.
“I know,” Mason said. “Tough, isn’t it? A man always hates to go to jail thinking he’s been a sucker.”
Serle said, “I’m not a sucker.”
“You’re being one right now,” Mason said.
The waitress brought their dessert. Mason started eating his ice cream.
Serle pushed his pie to one side, and said, “Oh, all right! Have it your own way. I’d known Louie off and on for several years. He picked up the agency for this loaded dice business. I’d worked out a sweepstakes proposition. I figured I could combine ’em. Louie wouldn’t sell me an interest.
“Then Louie wanted to get out. He told me he’d made a killing, had picked up twenty grand on the first installment, and said he was going to get a hundred before he quit.”
“Blackmail?” Mason asked.
“What do you think?”
“I’m not thinking,” Mason said, finishing his ice cream. “I’m listening.”
“Of course, it was blackmail! It was a sweet hookup.”
“Know what he had on Leeds?” Mason asked.
“Of course not. You don’t think Louie was that simple, do you? When a man has a gold mine, he doesn’t give his friends a chance to jump the claim.
“Well, I bought the business. I thought it would be a good thing to move it, but I kept the name because it was a mail-order business.”
“Go ahead,” Mason told him.
“The law raided my dump. I was out. They picked up a lot of incriminating stuff, but couldn’t prove any deliveries. My assistant was smart enough to dump the tickets where they’d be absolutely safe.”
“The officers will pick up your mail as it comes in,” Mason said.
Serle laughed. “That’s what you think. As soon as I heard about it, I beat it to the post office the very first thing and left a change of address. There won’t be a single letter come into the dump.”
“Nice going,” Mason observed.
Serle looked pleased with himself.
“Then what?” Mason asked.
“Then, of course, I went to Conway. I was sore. I thought he’d sold me something hot.”
“What did Conway say?” Mason asked.
“Conway was worried. He said he’d bail me out, that the thing had been clean as a hound’s tooth when he sold it to me. Naturally, I told him it was Leeds that was responsible for the police tip-off. He said it couldn’t be. I told him it was, and that it was up to him to square the rap.”
“Just what did Conway say?” Mason asked.
“He said, ‘Tell you what you do, Guy. Hide out until I have a chance to get things fixed up the way I want ’em. It’ll probably take me a couple of hours, but it may be a little sooner. Give me a ring, and I’ll let you know when to come up. Then you come up to my apartment, and we’ll talk things over.’ I told him I didn’t want to talk things over, I wanted action. He told me to come up, and I’d get action.”
“So you went up?” Mason asked.
“Yes, I went up. I was pretty nervous. Louie was busy as a one-armed paper hanger, answering the telephone, and scribbling a bunch of figures. Neither of us had eaten, and Louie gave me the number of a restaurant and told me to have some grub sent up. He said he could only give me a few minutes while we were eating. He said he was putting over a couple of big deals.
“While we were guzzling grub, Louie said to me, ‘Now listen, Guy. I dropped most of that twenty grand I made in the touch from Leeds, but I’m resourceful and I stick by my friends. Now I don’t want you to know anything about this — it wouldn’t be good for you — but a party’s going to be in here a little before ten with some dough — lots of it. Now, suppose you call me up and get an okay to be sure there’s no hitch. Then go down to jail, be booked, put up a cash bond, and walk right out.’”
Mason stared at the tip of his cigarette. “You say Louie had a lot of other things he was doing?” he asked.
“Yes. The phone rang two or three times, and he put in a couple of calls.”
“What were they?” Mason asked.
Serle said, “I can’t help you much there. I had my own problems to worry about. Some of it was dope on the horses. Some of it wasn’t. I remember he told somebody that things had been all settled up, and there wasn’t going to be any trouble. He said, ‘Why don’t you come on down, and let me talk it over with you?’ And then he said, ‘Well, I could run up for just a minute. I don’t want to be away more than a minute or two, but I can run up if you want.’ And then he said, ‘Well, that’s all right then. You come down, but don’t do it before ten o’clock. I’m going to be busy until after ten o‘clock.’”
“Anything else?” Mason asked.
“There were lots of calls. I can’t remember all of them. One of them was from his girl. She seemed to be all steamed up about something, and he was trying to smooth her over with a lot of yes-yes stuff. Hell, Mason, I can’t remember all that junk. If I’d known he was going to get bumped off, I’d have listened, but all I wanted was to find out where I stood.”
“Go on from there,” Mason said.
“That’s about all there is to it,” Serle told him. “I left there right after we’d eaten, went down to a poolroom I knew, and hung around there until ten o’clock, then I called Louie, and he said everything was okay, that he’d stick around and wait for me to call from the station, jump in a cab, come down and put up the bail, and that would be all there was to it.”
“Did you call the police immediately after that?” Mason asked.
“No, I didn’t. I wanted a little time to go over what I was going to tell the law. I played a game of pool and figured things out. I can think better while I’m knocking the ball around.”
“What time did you call Louie?” Mason asked.
“Right around ten o’clock.”
“As late as ten-thirty?” Mason asked, casually.
“Hell, no, it was ten o‘clock. Christ, he told me to call at ten, and I called at ten. When a guy’s going to put up the cash to spring you on a felony rap, you don’t let half an hour slip through your fingers.”
Mason said coldly, “Serle, you’re lying. You called him around ten-thirty. You didn’t remember the exact time. The first time you told your story, you admitted it. But after you’d talked with Homicide and seen they wanted to fix the call before Leeds had left, you decided to oblige them. You figured you could square your rap if you were obliging.”
Serle said doggedly, “It was ten o’clock when I called... They say Leeds is a multimillionaire.”
“So I hear,” Mason said.
“Maybe this is going to be kind of important to him,” Serle suggested. “He might want to do something for me.”
Mason met his eyes in cold, steady appraisal.
The waitress approached, said hurriedly to Mason, “You’re Perry Mason?”
He nodded.
“There’s a call for you from your office. They said it’s very important, to get you at once.”
Mason gestured toward Serle with a sweep of his hand.
“Give him the check,” he said, “with my compliments.”
He strode to the telephone booth. Della Street was on the line.
“Listen, Chief,” she said, breathlessly. “Drake’s located Alden Leeds.”
“Where?”
“Seattle. Emily Milicant’s with him. Drake’s Seattle correspondent is keeping him under surveillance. Your plane leaves in thirty minutes. Think you can make it? I’ve got your reservation. I’ll wire you all the details care of the Portland airport.”
Mason said, “I’ll make it. Take this in shorthand.”
“Okay. Shoot.”
“Milicant’s apartment was on the sixth floor. Check everyone who had apartments above him. Serle let something slip about a conversation Milicant had over the phone. It may have been with someone above him in the same apartment house. Tell Drake a waitress named Hazel Stickland of the Home Kitchen Cafe took a runout powder. Have him check on that waiter who took the food up to Milicant’s apartment. We’re taking this waiter’s story too much for granted. Find out if he knows this waitress. Have Drake try to find Hazel. Serle’s sold us out to the D.A., lock, stock, and barrel. He fixes that conversation at ten o’clock. He knows he’s lying, but he figures he can square his own pinch that way. Alden Leeds probably telephoned police the tip-off that got Serle’s place raided. Milicant knew that when Leeds called, Leeds probably left another twenty grand with Milicant when he paid that last visit. Milicant must have been killed almost immediately after that... Give all that dope to Paul Drake. Got it?”
“Got it,” she said. “Happy landings, Chief.”
Mason hung up and sprinted out of the restaurant.