Developments in connection with the murder of Robert Dover Hines were whizzing along with bewildering rapidity over the week end. Perry Mason, the noted criminal lawyer whose successes have made his name almost a household word, has announced that he is defending both Adelle Winters and Eva Martell. The retort of the district attorney’s office to this was to rush Miss Mae Bagley, a rooming-house manager, before a night session of the Grand Jury. The police claim that on the night of the murder Perry Mason managed to whisk Eva Martell out from under their noses and keep her in concealment until after she had been thoroughly coached by someone in what to say, or rather in what not to say.
Mae Bagley, it is understood, cheerfully told the Grand Jury all that she didn’t know. She was, she insisted, running a respectable rooming house and conforming with all the legal requirements. She had never seen Eva Martell in her life, much less rented her a room.
Confronted with the fact that the driver of the taxi-cab in which Eva Martell was riding says that he was summoned to the rooming house operated by Mae Bagley and that he there picked up Eva Martell who was riding in his cab when police made the arrest, Miss Bagley has a whole fistful of explanations, starting with the simple statement that the taxi driver is mistaken. She points out that there are several rooming houses in the immediate vicinity, and that anyone can easily summon a taxi to go to a certain address and then be standing there in the doorway when it drives up, even if that isn’t where he actually lives. She ventured a wager with the Grand Jury that she herself could summon a taxi-cab to call for her at the home of the assistant district attorney, could appear at his front door at the exact moment the taxicab arrived, and could — by walking down to the cab and drawing on her gloves as she left the door — create in the driver’s mind the impression that she had stayed there all night — an experience which, Mae Bagley forcefully pointed out, she had no intention of enjoying.
It was rumored that her testimony brought smiles to the faces of many of the grand jurors, and that Harry Gulling, who has been in charge of mapping strategy in the case for the D.A.’s office, was plainly nettled at the answers he received. Threats of a prosecution for perjury are said to have been repeatedly made without having the slightest effect on the witness.
So far as the case against the two principal defendants is concerned, Gulling points out dryly that, according to Eva Martell’s sworn statement, she was with Adelle Winters every minute of the day on which the shooting concededly occurred. Robert Hines was killed, Gulling points out, with a gun concededly owned by Adelle Winters — a gun which, according to an eye-witness, Mrs. Winters endeavored to conceal in a garbage pail at a downtown hotel shortly after the shooting. At the time of her arrest, she was found to have Hines’s wallet on her person, and the murder concededly was committed in an apartment occupied at the time by Adelle Winters. If, Gulling points out, Perry Mason can find some explanation for those facts consistent with the innocence of his clients, “we might,” to quote the assistant district attorney, “just as well throw the law books away, give Perry Mason the keys to the jail, and provide his clients with hunting licenses good for at least one victim a day.”
There is no secret among courthouse attaches that this is something of a grudge fight of long standing. Gulling, who is recognized by those who know their way around as the mainspring in actuating strategy in the district attorney’s office, is out to get Perry Mason. While Gulling seldom appears in court, he is reputed among attorneys to have a keen, methodical mind and an encyclopedic knowledge of the law.
Both prosecution and defense have signified their desire to have an early trial, and it is understood that a date left open by the continuance of another case has been tentatively suggested by Gulling, who is particularly anxious to get the murder cases disposed of so that an attempt to prosecute Perry Mason will have no legal obstacles to hurdle. It has been suggested further
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Mason didn’t bother to turn to the inside page. He folded the paper, tossed it to one side, and said to Della Street, “Della, I have a letter I want you to write.”
She whipped open her notebook and held her pencil ready.
“This letter,” Mason instructed her, “is not to be typed. It must be written in longhand on a delicately perfumed sheet of stationery. It will read: ‘Dear Mr. Mason. I hope you won’t think I did wrong in telling the Grand Jury I had never seen Eva Martell in my life. Things happened so fast I didn’t have any time to get in touch with you and wasn’t sure just what I should do under the circumstances. However, I remembered that when I last heard from you, you told me that you wanted me to put her in a room where— But I guess I’d better say this in our code.’ ”
Della Street looked up with surprise, her eyebrows raised interrogatively.
“Now,” Mason said, “let’s devise a code that no one can decipher!”
“I thought experts could decipher any code.”
“They can,” Mason answered with a grin, “provided the code means anything! You, Della, will fill the rest of that sheet of social stationery with letters and numbers, all mixed together and broken up into words containing five characters each. See that there are both numbers and letters in each word. And when you finish it, sign the letter ‘Mae’ and bring it in to me.”
“No last name?”
“No last name — just ‘Mae.’ ”
“Chief, what in the world are you doing? It’s manufacturing evidence that will put your neck in a noose!”
“Exactly,” Mason said. “When you have written the letter, go to the bank and get me seven hundred and fifty dollars in cash. And,” he warned as Della started for the door, “be sure to see that the handwriting in the letter is unmistakably feminine.”
“Any particular type of stationery?” Della asked.
“I think Mae would buy a box of pale-rose or something of that sort; and don’t forget the perfume!”
“I won’t,” she promised. “I’ll get started right now.” And she left the office.
A few minutes later Paul Drake’s code knock sounded on the door of Mason’s private office. The lawyer crossed over to open it.
“Hello, Paul, what’s new?”
“Lots of things,” Drake said. “When I got to my office I found a collection of stuff.”
“Important?”
“I think it’s damned important, Perry.”
Drake crossed over to the big overstuffed chair, slid into his favorite position, his legs dangling over one of the arms, his back propped against the other.
“Now here’s a funny one,” Drake said. “I got this right from headquarters and I’m darned if I know what it means.”
“Shoot.”
“You know that the banks these days are-quietly keeping a record of all large bills passed out. They don’t say much about it, but when a man asks for big bills the bank keeps a record. Not ostentatiously, of course. For instance, the hundred-dollar bills in a drawer are listed by their serial numbers. A man who wants ten hundred-dollar bills gets the top ten — and after he’s left the bank the cashier makes a note of the top ten numbers on the list, and that’s that. They’ve got a record of who has those particular bills.”
Mason nodded.
“Now in that wallet of Hines’s,” Drake went on, “there were twenty-one hundred-dollar bills. I don’t think the police have yet traced the history of all of those bills, and probably they never will, because the bills came from various sources. But the point is that five of them, Perry, came from Orville L. Reedley.”
“The devil they did!”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well,” Mason commented, “when you stop to figure that angle of it, I guess... Say, Paul, let’s check up on this Reedley boy. Let’s find out where he was at the time the murder was committed. After all, you know, he’s supposed to be insanely jealous and—”