As Mason entered the lobby of the hotel, he said to Paul Drake, “Paul, I’ve been doing a little thinking. I’m uneasy about this Eves business.”
“Why?” Drake asked. “Eves is a crook. He respects you because you’re a mouthpiece. He’ll go the limit for you. Moar’s statement to Evelyn Whiting gives you everything you need in front of a jury. Even if his wife did beat the gun and bump him off, you’re never going to get a jury to bring in a verdict against her — not after Evelyn Whiting tells her story.”
Mason said, “Just the same, Paul, I want you to look up Roger P. Cartman, find out all about the automobile accident in which he was injured over on the Islands, find out who his friends were, and find out where he is now.”
“Okay,” Drake said, “I’ll get busy on it right away.”
Mason paused at the desk for his key. The clerk handed him a key and several messages. Looking them over, Mason found they were messages of his calls to Della Street.
“Hasn’t Miss Street come in yet?” he asked the clerk.
The clerk said, “I don’t think so.
Mason strode toward the elevator. “Come on, boy,” he said to the operator, “shake a leg. See how quickly you can get this crate to the fifth floor.”
They emerged on the fifth floor. Mason strode down the corridor, fitted the key to the lock, flung the door open. “She hasn’t been here since morning,” he said. “Look here, Paul, something’s happened to her.”
“She left under her own power,” Drake pointed out.
“But she’d have come back or left a message,” Mason said. “For God’s sake, do something. Don’t stand there gawking at me.”
“What do you want me to do?” Drake asked.
“Get on the phone,” Mason said. “Start your men covering the city. Check the automobile accidents. Cover the ambulance calls. Check through the hospitals. Give me some action.”
Drake nodded, ran through the connecting door to his room and started putting through calls.
Mason’s telephone rang. The lawyer scooped it up, placed the receiver to his ear, said, “Hello,” and heard Belle Newberry’s voice saying, “Is that you, Mr. Mason?”
“Yes. Where are you, Belle?”
“At my hotel. I’ve been calling you all afternoon. They let me out when they knew you were getting a writ of habeas corpus.”
“Have you heard anything from Della?” Mason asked.
“No. I’ve been ringing the hotel every half hour. No one’s answered. I didn’t want to leave any message because I was afraid some newspaper reporters might get hold of it, and I’m dodging them.”
“Jump in a cab and come on up here,” Mason said. “I want to talk with you.”
He hung up the receiver, walked through the suite of rooms to Della Street’s bedroom, then retraced his steps and went through to Drake’s room. Drake had just finished putting through telephone calls.
“Okay, Perry,” Drake said. “If anything’s happened to her, I’ll have a report within half an hour.”
“If anything’s happened to her,” Mason said, “half an hour’s too long.”
“Well, I’ll get it just as soon as the information’s available. I told the office to put on as many extra men as they needed. It’ll take a little while to get them all working, but we’ll cover the city with a fine-tooth comb. We’ll know within five minutes if there’s been any accident reported of if she’s in the emergency hospital.”
Mason nodded. “Belle Newberry’s coming up,” he said. “They let her out, eh?”
“Yes. It was a bonehead move, holding her, in the first place. They wanted to shake information out of her about that money. They’re more interested in the eighteen thousand than they are in anything else.”
Mason started pacing the floor. “The thing gets me, Paul,” he said. “I should have come back here earlier in the day. To think that while we were chasing around, running down clues, Della may have been lying in a hospital somewhere, seriously hurt.”
“She had her purse with her, didn’t she?”
“I believe so, yes.”
“How about calling your Los Angeles office, Perry? If anything had happened to her, they’d have found her Los Angeles address, and—”
“Good idea,” Mason said. He jerked the receiver from the hook and told the operator to rush through a call to his Los Angeles office. Once more, he resumed pacing the floor.
The phone rang. Drake picked it up, said, “Hello,” listened for several seconds, said, “All right, throw out a dragnet. Cover everything.”
He hung up the telephone and said, “No ambulance report on her, Perry. Nothing in the emergency hospital. No report at the police desk.”
“What else could have happened,” Mason asked, “if it wasn’t an automobile accident?”
“She might have been rushed to a private hospital somewhere,” Drake said. “We’ll know on that within half an hour.”
“Let’s see,” Mason reflected. “It was raining when she left here. That means the roads were pretty slippery. Someone might have skidded into her, and rushed her to a hospital... But he’d have reported the accident to the police by this time.”
“He would unless he’d have been injured himself,” Drake said.
“Even then, the police would have known of the accident.”
Drake nodded.
“What else could have happened to her?” Mason asked.
“I don’t know,” Drake said. “She might have... Say, wait a minute, Perry.
“Go on,” Mason said, as the detective hesitated, “spill it.”
“She went out under her own power,” Drake said. “Now, as I understand it, she wouldn’t ordinarily have done that without leaving a message for you or giving you a buzz to see if you had anything you wanted her to do. Is that right?”
“That’s right,” Mason said.
“Well, then let’s suppose she went out on something fast, something which couldn’t wait.”
“What are you getting at, Paul?”
“Just this,” Drake said. “We weren’t where we were immediately available. Remember, we were going over to Marian Whiting’s. Della wouldn’t have called you there unless it had been a major emergency, because she knew you were going to try to shake Marian down for some information.”
“Go ahead,” Mason said. “Get to the answer. Never mind the preliminaries.”
“Remember,” Drake said, “just before we went over there, this table steward of yours had brought in a piece of blue silk. We’d cut it up into three pieces and—”
Mason nodded, fished the segment of blue silk out of his vest pocket and said, “Yes, you mentioned that before. Do you think she may have located that blue silk dress?”
Drake said, “Suppose she had? She’d have gone out to make sure, if she’d been in doubt. All right, now suppose while she was making sure, she tipped her hand, and someone did something about it.”
“That wouldn’t have happened,” Mason said. “It’s too unlikely.”
“Don’t kid yourself it’s unlikely,” Drake told him. “Let’s figure about that dress, Perry. That dress was on a cleat on the outside of the rail.” Mason nodded.
“And with the sea that was running, no one would have been climbing around on the outside of the rail.”
“What are you getting at?” Mason asked.
“Just this,” Drake said. “Suppose that someone gave Moar the works. Suppose the Fell woman is telling the truth, and a woman hoisted him up to the rail and pushed him over. Just as he went, he made a grab at her and ripped a chunk of cloth out of her dress. As he fell, that cloth caught on the cleat and ripped from his fingers.”
“That’s just a theory, Paul.”
“All right,” Drake said, give me some other theory which will hold water, and account for that dress being on the outside of the ship.”
Mason squinted his eyes in thought and stared moodily at the carpet. The telephone rang. He picked it up and learned that his Los Angeles office was on the line. Jackson told him they had had no word from or about Della Street.
As Mason was ready to hang up, the hotel operator cut in on the line and said, “Mr. Mason, a Miss Newberry is down here.”
“Send her up,” Mason said.
He was idly twisting the piece of blue silk in his fingers when Belle Newberry rapped at the door.
Mason let her in, shook hands and said, “How was it, Belle, pretty bad?”
“It was tough,” she told him, “but not too tough. Poor Moms, I’m afraid she’s having a harder time on it.”
“I’m going down to see her tonight,” Mason said. “I have her preliminary set for tomorrow morning. I wanted to get down this afternoon but I’ve been busy. I’ve uncovered a witness who will smash the case wide open. Tomorrow night she’ll be a free woman.”
Belle’s eyes widened with glad surprise. “You’re certain, Mr. Mason?” she asked.
Mason nodded. “This witness,” he said, “will show that Carl was trapped. He knew the game was up and he’d decided to end it all to save you disgrace.”
“You mean he committed suicide?” she asked.
Mason nodded.
“I hate to think of Carl doing that,” she said.
“He did it because he cared so much for you, Belle.”
“But why did he do it? ”
“I think the money he had was hot money.”
“What do you mean by hot money?”
“Money which had been illegally obtained, and he thought the law was catching up with him.”
She shook her head slowly and said, “That doesn’t sound like Carl. He was pretty conservative, you know, Mr. Mason. He wasn’t given much to taking chances.”
“Well,” Mason said, “the facts all point to it and this witness will swear to it.”
“What’s the cloth?” she asked, noticing the piece of silk Mason was twisting in his fingers.
“Recognize it?” Mason asked, handing it out to her.
She looked at it and frowned. “I’ve seen it before somewhere.”
“You saw it somewhere on the ship,” Mason told her. “A woman had a dress made of it, probably an evening gown. It was—”
“Oh, I have it,” Belle Newberry said. “I remember it now, I remember the pattern in it.”
“Good girl,” Mason told her. “Whose was it?”
“That nurse wore it.”
Mason glanced at the detective. “Evelyn Whiting?” he asked.
“Yes, the one who was nursing the man with the broken neck.”
“You’re sure?” Mason asked.
“Absolutely positive,” she said.
Mason said to Drake, “All right, Paul, there’s your answer. Della spotted this material. She went out to check up on it. Remember, Evelyn Whiting had been out in that mountain cabin since yesterday afternoon. Eves had been away all night. Eves is a known crook. He’d stop at nothing. Now, if Della were pinning something on Evelyn Whiting—”
Drake reached for the telephone. “What do we do, Perry?” he asked.
Mason said, “Round up a bunch of hard-boiled dicks with plenty of guns and ammunition. We’re going back to that cabin, Paul. Thinking back on it, Eves was altogether too much on the prod when he came in, then he was too anxious to make a play for my gratitude. Get going!”
Drake grabbed the telephone, put through a call to his office and said, “Get me half a dozen tough babies who can dish it out and take it. I’d like to have a couple of special deputy sheriffs in the lot, and I want guns, ammunition and tear gas.”
“What is it?” Belle Newberry asked, staring with apprehensive eyes at the grim face of the lawyer.
“Della Street’s missing,” Mason said. “She went out this morning and we haven’t heard from her since. A check-up on the hospitals and automobile accidents shows she hasn’t been injured. When she went out, she was trying to trace down this piece of blue silk.”
“Is there anything I can do?” Belle Newberry asked. Mason said, “Yes, you wait here and play secretary. Take all the messages that come in, and be ready to give me a complete report whenever I call in. You, Paul, tell your office to report to Belle and give her all the dope. Keep men on the job.”
Mason walked to his suitcase, pulled out a bolstered revolver, unbuckled his belt and slipped the strap through the loop in the holster. “Come on, Paul,” he said to the detective, who was telephoning. “We haven’t got all day, you know. Tell ‘em to rash those men down here.”