"No," he said. Duncan and Manning exchanged glances, then Manning looked away hastily.
Matilda Benson calmly pulled a cigar from her leather cigar case, cut off the end, and lit the cigar before the astonished eyes of the district attorney. "This shorthand reporter is going to take down everything I say?" she asked.
"Yes. He's taking down everything," the district attorney said.
"Very well," Mrs. Benson remarked, in a voice of complete resignation. "I don't know what the punishment will be for what I've done. Whatever it is, I'm willing to take my medicine. I'm not afraid to die. My life-expectancy is short, anyway. Sylvia and her daughter mean a lot more to me than my own life. Grieb and Duncan were blackmailing Sylvia. I felt they were both a couple of rats. I didn't think they deserved to live. I went aboard the ship with the deliberate intention of killing both Grieb and Duncan."
"Were you armed?" the district attorney asked.
"Certainly I was armed," she said. "I carried a.38 automatic in my handbag. What did you think I expected to kill them with, my hands?"
"Go ahead," the district attorney said hastily.
"I watched for a chance, waiting. I saw Sylvia go into the office. I waited. I saw Frank Oxman go into the office. I opened my bag and slipped the automatic down the front of my dress. I saw Oxman come out. I saw Mason go in, and Sylvia come out. I saw Duncan and Perkins go in. Then I saw Perkins and Mr. Mason come out. I said to myself, 'Now is my time. Both the men I want to kill are in there.' I gripped my gun in my right hand and tiptoed cautiously down the corridor. I slipped silently into the outer office. I could see the door of the vault in the inner office, but I couldn't see Grieb's desk. The door blocked my line of vision; but I supposed, of course, Grieb was sitting there at his desk. I saw Duncan bending over the vault door, opening it. I leveled my gun, and was just about to pull the trigger, when Duncan opened the door of the vault and I saw Manning come out. I didn't want to kill Duncan while Manning was there, so I slipped back into the corridor. I saw Duncan come out. I followed him down to the room where Perry Mason was being searched. I listened at the door. I heard voices and learned Grieb had been killed, so I ran up on deck and waited a few moments, wondering what to do. I saw Sylvia come up, and I thought Sylvia was going to speak to me. I realized then that I'd be searched, so I tossed my gun overboard. But Sylvia didn't see me. She ran down the landing-stairs and took a launch which was leaving for the shore. I tried to protect Sylvia, because I thought she might be implicated in Grieb's murder. So I had Mr. Mason get my coat, and I threw it overboard. I smuggled Sylvia's coat ashore and…"
"You're willing to swear to this?" the district attorney interrupted, his voice excited. "You're willing to swear that you actually saw Duncan open the vault and Manning step out?"
Slowly, impressively, Matilda Benson got to her feet and held up her right hand. "You show me the grand jury room, young man," she said, her eyes snapping, "and I'll go in and swear to it right now. I'm telling the truth and nothing but the truth."
Duncan met the district attorney's accusing eyes. His own eyes were slightly squinted as though he were making a rapid mental readjustment. Suddenly he said, "They're all wet. I wasn't Manning's accomplice. I didn't know Manning was in the vault. I didn't lock it, as Mason claims. I did open it after Mason had left the office. You could have knocked me over with a feather when I opened that vault and Manning walked out. He told me he'd gone into the vault to get some papers for Grieb, when he heard someone knock at the outer door and a woman's voice call out, 'This is Sylvia Oxman. Let me in.' Grieb yelled, 'You stay in there for a few minutes, Arthur,' and slammed the door of the vault shut.
"Arthur stayed inside and heard the muffled sound of a shot. He tried to get out and couldn't. He didn't hear anything more until I opened the door of the vault. It was Sylvia Oxman who shot Grieb, and she carried away the gun.
"I wanted to get rid of Mason and Perkins so I could get those IOU's out of the vault. I'm willing to admit I figured I could pull a fast one with them. I didn't see any reason why they should be a part of the partnership assets and be ruled uncollectable by a court. If I could have found them, I could have collected from Sylvia and pocketed the coin.
"Finding Manning in there gave me an awful shock. Manning told me what had happened. He said Sam had the IOU's under the blotter on his desk. I looked for them and they were gone. I knew I'd put myself in an awful spot. If I said anything about finding Arthur Manning in that vault, I knew someone would accuse me of having planned the whole business, with Manning as my accomplice. I figured Perry Mason was covering Sylvia Oxman.
"I realized no one knew Manning had been in the vault, so I figured the best thing to do was to let Arthur out, say nothing about what had happened, and let the police pin the murder on Sylvia Oxman. Of course, if I'd known Mrs. Benson had seen me…"
"You damn fool!" Manning screamed. "She didn't see you! She couldn't have seen you. She's lying. Belgrade was watching the corridor, and he didn't see her go down the corridor before you came out. What's more, she didn't ring the bell in the inner office. She'd have done that if what she says is true. You've walked into a trap!"
Perry Mason chuckled delightedly. "Keep right on talking, Arthur," he said.
CHAPTER 16
PERRY MASON sat in his office and regarded Matilda Benson with respect in his eyes. "How the devil," he asked, "did you ever concoct such a beautiful lie on the spur of the moment?"
"Young man," she said, taking her cigar from her mouth and staring at him with snapping gray eyes, "I've lived sixty-eight years. I lived my girlhood in an age of universal hypocrisy. I found it was necessary for me to lie. I've had exactly fifty years of practice in extemporaneous prevarication. I'm not exactly a fool; and when I sized up the situation and saw how absolutely logical your theory was, I felt that it needed a damned good lie to bolster it up. And if you think it took any great amount of skill to think up as simple a lie as that, you should have heard some of the whoppers I've told in my time." She wrapped her lips about her cigar, puffed a couple of times, took the cigar from her mouth, nodded her head, and went on proudly, "And made them stick, too! Don't forget that."
Della Street opened the door from her secretarial office to bring in a filing jacket filled with papers.
"All there, Della?" Mason asked.
She nodded. "Everything's ready for Sylvia's signature."
Mason said to Matilda Benson, "Here are the papers in Sylvia's divorce action. She's alleging cruelty on the ground that her husband made a false statement to the officers, willfully, maliciously and falsely accusing her of the crime of murder."
"Can she get a divorce on that?" Matilda Benson asked.
"You bet she can," Mason said. "We've got Frank Oxman right where we want him. The minute Charlie Duncan thought there was a chance to save his bacon by trying to invent an explanation which would account for Manning's being in the vault, he gave us every trump card in the deck. Now, with those two crooks in separate cells and each one thinking the other is going to double-cross him, with Manning thinking that Duncan is going to make him the goat all the way through, it's a cinch something's bound to break."
Matilda Benson nodded, tucked the filing jacket of papers under her arm and said, "All right, I'll get Sylvia's signature to the complaint."
"And she'll have to sign the affidavit of verification before a notary public," Mason said. "Then I'll be ready to file the case."
The white-haired woman's jeweled fingers gripped the lawyer's hand with a firmness which was almost masculine. "I knew you'd see me through," she said.