“Okay,” Drake said. “It won’t take more than two men in addition to the ones we have.”

  “All right. Get them.”

  “Any chance your clients had anything to do with the murder?” Drake asked.

  “Don’t be silly, Paul. My clients never have anything to do with murders. These people simply happened to stumble over the corpse. They notified me and wanted me to come out. I have already used up my allotment of corpse-discoveries so far as the police are concerned. I told them to get in touch with the police.”

  “And tell them they’re your clients?”

  “Why not?”

  “That’s going to make for a lot of interesting developments . . . . I’ll put these calls through, get my men on the job, and then come down to your office.”

  “Before you leave here,” Mason said, “try to get all the details that are available about the killing.”

  “You say Hines was the victim?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And he’s the one who hired the women?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, let me put these calls through, Perry, and get the men on the job. Maybe we’ll find out something.” And Drake was reaching for the telephone as Mason left the office.

  “Did you get Paul all right?” Della Street asked when he had returned to his desk.

  Mason nodded. “Paul Drake’s going to have men on the job covering the whole thing. He’ll also get details about the murder. Meantime, there’s nothing much to do except stick around and bite our fingernails. I’d give a good deal to be there right now. That’s the trouble: I’ve too often been on the ground when corpses have been discovered. This time I’ll keep in the background.”

  “How long do you suppose we’ll have to wait?”

  “For detailed information?”

  “Yes.”

  “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “Several things. The breaks, mostly. If one of the persons shadowing those women gets in touch with his principal personally, and if we get the breaks, we could know something within an hour.”

  Della Street thought things over for a while. “Gosh,” she said, “there’s one thing that keeps cropping up in my mind.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Adelle Winters having a .32-caliber revolver in her handbag. Do you suppose the police will search her?”

  “You’re reading my mind!” Mason said.

  “If it turns out that Mr. Hines has been shot by a .32 gun,” Della went on reflectively, “wouldn’t that . . . What would it do?”

  “That depends. It might not mean too much. Of course, the whole thing will depend on what happens when they recover the bullet and the ballistics experts get done with it. They can tell whether it was or was not fired from any particular gun. You know that.”

  “If they have the bullet?”

  “That’s right.”

  Della was looking at Mason in a peculiar way. “And the gun?”

  “And the gun.”

  “That last,” she said slowly, “changes the situation.”

  “No, it doesn’t change it any,” Mason returned, “but it does complicate it.”

  “Of course, no one knows just how smart Adelle Winters is.”

  Mason grinned and looked at his watch. “We’ll probably have an answer to that question, too, within an hour, Della. Let’s go get something to eat.”

  Chapter 6

  IT WAS after nine o’clock and Mason was pacing the floor when Paul Drake’s peculiarly spaced code knock sounded on the door of the outer office.

  “That’s Paul,” Mason said. “Let him in, will you, Della.”

  As Drake entered the office he said, “Hi, Della!” and, with a grimace at Mason, blew out his breath in a weary whistle. “Gosh, Perry, I’ve been busy!”

  “Found out anything?”

  “I think we’ve struck pay dirt.”

  “Shoot.”

  Drake dropped sidewise into the big overstuffed leather chair. “Your two women did a lot of shopping. Then they had dinner and went back to the apartment. My boys had spotted the chaps who were shadowing them and had no difficulty in trailing along behind.”

  “The men who were shadowing the women followed them in their shopping and to the apartment?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And your men shadowed the shadows?”

  “Right.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then all hell broke loose. Sirens, police cars, and excitement. Thanks to your tip, I got some reinforcements there in time and we were able to cover everything.”

  “Just what happened?”

  “Well, one of the chaps rushed out to a public telephone. My operative had a small, very powerful pair of binoculars and he was able to look through the glass door of the booth and get the number the man dialed. He looked it up, and it’s the number of the Interstate Investigators. My man telephoned me what he’d found out, and I immediately rushed men to the Interstate office, just as you’d instructed.

  “Out at the scene of the crime, the Interstate men were busy trying to find someone they could pump, someone who knew the low-down. Finally, from a friendly police officer they got as much as anyone could get—the same as the newspaper men are getting. It may not be all the story, but it’s most of it.”

  “Which was what?” Mason asked.

  “Well, you know the identity of the corpse. What do you know about the murder itself?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, Hines had been shot in the middle of the forehead with a small-caliber gun, probably a .32.”

  “Any wound of exit?”

  “No.”

  “Then the bullet’s still in the skull?”

  “That’s right.”

  “When the police” get that, they can check the gun from which it was fired.”

  “Right.”

  “That’ll simplify matters somewhat.”

  “Or complicate them,” Drake said dryly, “depending on whether the gun was owned by your client or somebody else’s client! . . . Well, the Interstate boys kept going down to the phone and feeding details into the office just as fast as they could get them. Then Interstate sent a relief man out and called in one of the men who was on the job. I figured that meant the client was coming to the office and wanted a personal report. So we had everything in readiness. Sure enough, a rather prosperous-looking chap of forty-two or forty-three, around five feet ten, weight about a hundred and ninety pounds, wavy red hair, pearl-gray hat, and double-breasted gray suit with a small check-plaid pattern came bustling into the office. He was in there half an hour. When he left, our men picked him up and followed him down to his car—a big, high-powered outfit. We looked up the license number later. Our men tagged him out to one of the swank apartment houses and got his name from the janitor, and by that time we’d checked up on the car license and had the same name for that.”

  “What’s the name, Paid?”

  “Orville L. Reedley,” Drake said.

  Mason whistled. “Any relation to Helen Reedley?”

  “As soon as we got the name,” Drake went on, “I had a man look up a contact in the library of one of the newspapers. After pawing through the records he found that Orville L. Reedley married Helen Honcutt in March 1942. She gave her age as twenty-one, he gave his as thirty-eight. As nearly as we can tell from the information in these statistics, it’s the same Helen Reedley who has the apartment up there.”

  “This chap, Reedley,” Mason asked, “what does he do?”

  “He seems to be a broker.”

  Mason drummed on the edge of his desk with his finger tips. “Where is he now?”

  “Still holed up in his apartment with two of my men watching the place.”

  Mason pushed back his chair. “Let’s go, Paul,” he said.

  “Your car or mine?” Drake asked.

  “Where’s yours?”

  “Right outside.”

  “We’ll take it.”

  “Where do you want me?” Della Street asked.

  “Right here in the office, I guess, Della. We’ll get in touch with you. It may be we’ll want you to take down a statement after a while. You don’t mind sticking around?”

  “Not a bit.”

  “Let’s go, Paul,” and the two men left.

  Mason lit a cigarette as Drake started the car. “Now we’re beginning to see a pattern,” he said, as Drake pulled up at the first traffic signal that was against them.

  “You mean the husband angle?”

  “Uh-huh, and the private-detective angle.”

  “It has possibilities,” Drake admitted.

  “Of course, we’re in the position of taking two and two and making four out of it, and then trying to find something to add that will give us the total of ten. But we can make a reasonable guess at the figure we want.”

  “How reasonable is the guess, and what’s the figure?” Drake asked, grinning.

  “A wife comes to a city and starts living by herself. A husband wants to get a divorce. She’d like to have a property settlement, but her husband doesn’t want to be that generous. She says, ‘Okay, then we’ll get along without a divorce.’ He waits a while, finds that the shoe is pinching, and decides to employ some detectives to get something on her. She’s running around with a boy friend, but she’s smart enough to know when the dicks are going to be put on the job. No—wait a minute, Paul! There has to be a leak somewhere. She has to know that her husband is going to employ detectives before he actually employs them.”

  “How do you figure that out?”

  “Because as soon as he employed them, he’d give them her address and they’d pick her up and start following her. But, knowing that he’s going to employ detectives, she makes arrangements to give them all a run-around. She turns the apartment over to a brunette who looks like her, and she’s just as anxious as the substitute is to make sure there’ll be a chaperone on hand at all times. Then everything is done with the utmost propriety. The husband’s detectives are probably shown a photograph that’s a fuzzy snapshot, given a description, and told to go to that address, pick up Helen Reedley, and shadow her day and night. They get on the job, the address is right, the apartment is in the name of Helen Reedley. A brunette who answers the description of the woman they want is living there. They start shadowing her. There’s a chaperone living there with her, and the two are inseparable. The husband gets a steady string of reports showing the greatest decorum all around. He gets discouraged and tells his lawyers to make the best settlement possible in the circumstances.”

  “And in the meantime the real Helen Reedley is out playing around?” Drake asked.

  “Well,” Mason said, “she’s probably being a little discreet about things, but my guess is that she isn’t spending the long evenings by the fireside with her crocheting and knitting.”

  “Then this man Hines must be the boy friend.”

  “Somehow I don’t think so,” Mason said. “I think she’d be too smart to let the boy friend be around the apartment, because the husband’s detectives might start tailing him. No, I have an idea this fellow Hines is a stooge of some sort.”

  “Was,” suggested Drake.

  “Was is right,” Mason amended.

  “Well, what do you propose to do with this husband when we get there?”

  “I’m going to ask questions.”

  “Suppose he doesn’t answer them?”

  “Then I’ll have to guess at the answers from his manner and the way he handles himself.”

  “And that may be hard,” Drake pointed out.

  “It may be impossible,” Mason conceded, “but in any event we’ll have made a try . . . . Any idea what time the guy was murdered, Paul?”

  “Apparently early in the afternoon. But you know how the police are, Perry. They aren’t putting out too much along that line right now. They’ll have the autopsy surgeons making examinations, but they won’t stick their necks out with the answer until after they’ve found a suspect who fits into that particular schedule pretty accurately. You know how it is. The same way the police give out that someone has made a ‘tentative identification’ of a suspect—which means that they haven’t a case, but aren’t burning any bridges in case they can’t find a better bet.”

  Mason nodded.

  Drake piloted the car around a corner and found a parking place. “Looks like the only parking place in the block,” he said. “The apartment we want is that swanky one down there about half a block.”

  He locked the car and put the keys in his pocket, and he and Mason walked down the sidewalk, past expensive residences, and turned in at the rather ornate front of a high-class apartment house.

  The lobby had that subdued, deep-carpeted hush so frequently associated with the outward semblance of ultrarespectability. A quiet-voiced clerk on duty at the desk inquired the name of the tenant they wished to see.

  “Orville Reedley,” Mason replied.

  “Is he expecting you?”

  “Probably not. The name is Mason.”

  “Yes, sir—and the other gentleman’s name?”

  “Drake,” Mason said. “Tell him I’m a lawyer.”

  “Oh, you’re Perry Mason!”

  “That’s right.”

  “Yes, Mr. Mason, just a moment.”

  The clerk scribbled a note, pushed it through the wicket to the telephone operator, waited a few seconds, then turned and nodded to Mason. “Mr. Reedley will see you,” he said. “The boy in the elevator will direct you to his apartment.”

  Mason and Drake entered the elevator. The boy took them to the fifth floor. “It’s Apartment 5-B,” he said, “the third door down on the left.”

  Here again in the corridor was an atmosphere of quiet seclusion. Drake turned to Mason with a grin. “It stinks of dough,” he said.

  Mason nodded as he pressed the mother-of-pearl button at Apartment 5-B.

  The man who opened the door answered the description that had been given to Drake’s operative. But, dominating the physical characteristics of age, height, weight, and complexion which would have appealed to a professional detective, was the surging, dynamic power emanating from the man even as he stood there on the threshold.

  Hot, smoldering eyes regarded his two visitors. “Which one of you is Mason?”

  “I am,” Mason said stepping forward and extending his hand.

  Reedley hesitated a moment, took the hand, but turned almost at once to Drake. “Who’s the other one?”

  “Paul Drake.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He assists me in some of my cases.”

  “Lawyer?”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “Detective.”

  Reedley thought that over, his eyes moving from one to the other. Abruptly he stepped back in the doorway and said, “Come in.”

  Mason and Paul Drake crossed the threshold. Reedley’s powerful shoulders swung in a smooth pivot, pushing the door shut. “Sit down.”

  Mason and Drake found comfortable chairs in a living room whose Venetian blinds, Oriental rugs, and comfortable, well-chosen chairs bespoke taste and wealth.

  “Well,” Reedley said, “what’s it all about?”

  “Your wife’s living here in town?” Mason asked.

  “What business is it of yours?”

  “Frankly,” Mason said, “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “It may be important in a case I am handling.”

  “You’re a lawyer?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You have clients?”

  “Exactly.”

  “They pay you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You represent their interests?”

  “Right.”

  “And only their interests?”

  “Naturally.”

  “I am not your client. Somebody else is. Therefore you’re representing somebody else. Those interests may be adverse to mine. If they are, you’re my enemy. Why the hell should I answer your questions?”

  “Any reason why you shouldn’t?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Could any circumstances exist that would give you any possible reason for not telling me about where your wife is living now?”

  “I don’t even know that. Why should I tell you about it?”

  Mason said, “I’ll put it this way. Certain circumstances have caused me to take an interest in a Helen Reedley who is living at the Siglet Manor Apartments on Eighth Street. I’m wondering whether she is your wife?”

  “Why?”

  “I’m trying to find out something about her background.”

  “What about her background?”

  “Oh, who her friends are, for instance.”

  “Found out anything?”

  “Not yet.”

  “But you will?”

  “I may.”

  “I might be interested in that.”

  “Then she is your wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re separated?”

  “Obviously.”

  “How long have you been separated?”

  “Six months.”

  “You haven’t filed suit for divorce?”

  “No.”

  “She hasn’t?”

  “No.”

  “Do you intend to?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Does she intend to?”

  “Ask her.”

  “Any chance of a reconciliation?”

  “That also is none of your business.”

  “You’re not being very cooperative.”

  “Because I don’t propose to show ray hand without finding out what kind of game you want to play. What’s the object of this visit? What are you after?”

  “You’ve been in communication with her recently?”

  “No.”

  “May I ask when was the last time you talked with her personally?”

  “It was about three months ago. I’m telling you certain things that you can find out from other sources, Mason, but I certainly don’t intend to let you pump me for information, get up and say ‘Thank you,’ and walk out.”

 

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