Mason nodded his head moodily and said, "There's a diamondshaped panel of plate glass in the door of Hartley Basset's entrance room. She'd been slugged and was groggy. When she got up from the couch, she staggered and slapped both of her hands against the glass in order to catch herself. She must have left ten perfectly good fingerprints on that glass.
"Now, I'm just wondering about that girl and don't want to overlook any bets. She has some powerful motive for skipping out. Either she's protecting someone, or she's concealing something she did the night of the murder, or she has a record and doesn't dare to stand police questioning. She could have gone into the room, found Hartley Basset dead, lifted a bunch of money from his pocket, then socked herself on the head with something and pretended to be out.
"She could have seen Dick Basset commit the murder and skipped out to keep from testifying.
"She could be a crook, with a criminal record. Let's investigate all the possibilities. Skip out to Basset's house, develop those latent fingerprints on the glass of the door, photograph them, and see if you can get an identification."
Drake nodded slowly. "Anything else?" he asked.
"Not right now. Let's get the lowdown on this Fenwick woman."
As Paul Drake turned the knob of the door which led to the corridor, he said, with a droll smile, "There isn't any chance that the cops are right and you have this woman tucked away some place, is there, Perry?"
Mason grinned and said, "You might look under my desk, Paul."
The detective looked puzzled and said, "You sonofagun, if you're sending me on a runaround, I'll never trust you again."
He closed the door, and Mason turned to Della Street.
"Make a note," he said, "to look up how glass eyes are held in place, and how easily they can be jarred loose."
She finished making swift lines in her shorthand notebook, glanced up at Mason and said, "How about your fingerprints on that gun?"
Mason chuckled, and said, "I think the cops have overlooked a bet there. They fingerprinted everyone in the house, but they overlooked me."
She asked thoughtfully, "Is Hamilton Burger a shrewd district attorney?"
"I don't know yet," Mason said. "It's too early to tell. This is the first murder case that's come up since he's been in office."
"Do you know him personally?"
"I've met him, that's all."
"If he thinks you're responsible for getting this Fenwick witness out of the jurisdiction of the court, won't he take some action against you?"
"He may."
"What can you do if he does?"
"Simply tell the truth, which won't be enough."
"What do you mean by that?"
"If I told any jury on God's green earth that I had taken the key witness in a murder case, spirited her away from the officers, and sent her up to my office so I could find out exactly what she knew and get a written statement before the officers got hold of her, and then tried to explain that she'd disappeared and I didn't know where she had gone, it would indicate two things to the average newspaper reader: First, that I was a liar; second, that her statement had clinched the case against my client, that I was keeping her under cover for that reason."
Della Street nodded sympathetically.
The buzzer rang the code signal which announced that she was wanted on the telephone for an important message. She glanced at Perry Mason. He nodded. She picked up the receiver and said, "Hello." Her eyes narrowed. She placed her palm over the transmitter.
"Hamilton Burger," she said, "the district attorney, is in the office and wants to see you."
"Is he alone?" Mason asked.
Della Street repeated the interrogation into the transmitter, then nodded her head.
"Bring him in," Mason said. "Stick in here, and be sure that you take down every single word that's said. Perhaps he won't deliberately misquote me, but it's one of those situations where a lot may depend on having an ace in the hole."
She nodded and moved toward the door which led to the outer office. Mason got to his feet and stood straddlelegged, his fists resting on the edge of the desk.
Della Street opened the door and stood to one side. Hamilton Burger, a broadshouldered, thicknecked individual with a closecropped mustache, walked into the room and said affably, "Good afternoon, Mason."
Perry Mason nodded cautiously, indicated a chair and said, "Sit down. Is this an official or a social visit?"
"I think it's going to be social," Burger said.
Mason passed him cigarettes. Burger took one, lit up and smiled at Della Street, who had taken up her position at the far end of the desk.
"It won't be necessary to take down what I'm going to say," he said.
Mason said, "It's going to be necessary to take down what I'm not going to say, and the only way you can be certain of what I didn't say is by having some record of exactly what I did say."
The district attorney sized Perry Mason up with speculative eyes and said, "Look here, Mason, I've been checking up on you."
"That's not surprising to me," Mason told him.
"I've found," Burger said, "that you've got a reputation for being tricky."
Mason said, with a trace of belligerence, "Did you come here to discuss my reputation?"
"In a way, yes."
"All right, go ahead and discuss it, but be careful what you say."
"You've got a reputation," Burger went on, "for being tricky, and I find that you are tricky, but I think they're legitimate tricks."
"I'm glad you think so," Mason told him. "Your predecessor in office didn't think so."
"I think an attorney has a right to work any legitimate trick in order to bring out the truth," Burger went on. "I notice that your tricks aren't for the purpose of confusing a witness, but for the purpose of blasting preconceived notions out of his head, so that he can tell the truth."
Mason bowed and said, "I'll thank you when you've entirely finished. Experience has taught me that words of praise like this are generally preliminary to a slap."
"No slaps this time," Burger went on. "I just want you to understand my attitude."
"If that's your attitude," Mason said, "I understand it."
"Then you'll appreciate what I'm going to say."
"Go on and say it."
"District attorneys have a habit of wanting to get convictions. That's natural. The police work up a case and dump it in the lap of the district attorney. It's up to him to get a conviction. In fact, the reputation of a district attorney is predicated on the percentage of convictions he gets on the number of cases tried."
Mason said in a very casual voice, "Go ahead, I'm listening."
"When I took this job," Burger said, "I wanted to be conscientious. I have a horror of prosecuting an innocent person. I have been impressed by your work. You probably won't agree with the conclusion I have reached concerning it."
"What's the conclusion?" Mason asked.
"That you're a better detective than you are a lawyer, and that isn't any disparagement of your legal ability, either. Your courtroom technique is clever, but it's all of it founded on having first reached a correct solution of the case. When you resort to unorthodox tricks as a part of your courtroom technique I'm opposed to them, but when you use those tricks to bring about a correct solution of a mystery I'm for them. My hands are tied. I can't resort to unorthodox spectacular tactics. Sometimes I wish I could, particularly when I think a witness is lying to me about the identity of a criminal."
Mason said slowly, "Since you're being frank with me, which is something no other district attorney has ever done, I'll be frank with you, which, incidentally is something I've never bothered to be with any other district attorney. I don't ask a man if he's guilty or innocent. When I start to represent him, I take his money and handle his case. Guilty or innocent, he's entitled to his day in court, but if I should find one of my clients was really guilty of murder and wasn't morally or legally justified, I'd make that client plead guilty and trust to the mercy of the Court."