“How’s it coming, Chief?” she asked.
“Relax,” Mason said. “I think it’s all over.”
“How come?”
“Well,” Mason said, “the boys were pretty much upset. They went out to Twomby’s Lake to check up on things. They found that someone had beaten them to it. It didn’t take too much detective work to find out who that someone was. Then they located Arthur Felton, the boy who had recovered the bottle, learned from him that Mr. Mason had taken him to Hermann Korbel’s laboratory. So they dashed out there and grabbed the bottle before Korbel had finished his experiments. Then they started looking for me on the ground of tampering with evidence, compounding a felony, being an accessory after the fact and all the rest.”
“Chief,” Della Street said, her voice sharp with apprehension, “what did they—?”
“Relax,” Mason told her, laughing. “Right in the middle of their dramatic attempt to put me on the spot I telephoned Korbel. Korbel had managed to save scrapings from one of the tablets — a rather minute amount but still sufficient for his purpose. He had learned the nature of the pills just a few minutes before I phoned.”
“And what were the pills — cyanide?”
“The pills,” Mason said, “were the sugar substitute they were supposed to be. You can tell Nadine Farr to go about her business. She can get that load off her mind and off her conscience. Drop her wherever she wants to go and then drive back to the office.”
“Well, for pity’s sake!” Della Street said. “You mean that all of those pills were this sugar substitute?”
“That’s right, Della. The tests Korbel used were so sensitive that even if some of the other pills had been cyanide there would have been enough in his sample to show.
“Evidently someone in the house found this partially filled bottle of the sugar substitute, knew where Nadine kept the stuff and simply put this bottle in with the other. Is she there?”
“Yes.”
“Tell her, and then see if she has any questions.”
Mason held the phone, could hear the girls talking rapidly in tones of great excitement, then Della Street said, “Nadine wants me to ask you whatever became of the cyanide tablets she had in her room if those other tablets were the sugar substitute.”
Mason, radiating good nature, said, “Tell her I’m a lawyer, not a seer. She’d better go back and search her room again. It doesn’t make much difference where those tablets are. The big point is that the tablets she put in the chocolate were just what they were supposed to be and Mosher Higley died a natural death.
“Tell her she can go home. I haven’t time to talk with her now. Get on in here, Della, and I’ll buy you a dinner.”
Mason hung up the telephone, looked at the door to the outer office, waiting expectantly.
Within a few seconds Gertie, enjoying her role of taking Della Street’s place, escorted Mrs. Newburn into the office.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Newburn,” Mason said, smiling. “Come in and sit down.”
“Can I do anything else?” Gertie asked. “You want any notes taken or any—?”
“No, that’s all right,” Mason said.
“One of the other girls can watch the switchboard—”
Mason shook his head firmly.
Gertie, with disappointment in her eyes, swung back to her duties at the switchboard, and Mrs. Newburn came forward to extend her hand to Perry Mason.
“I know it was presumptuous of me to try to see you without making an appointment,” she said, “but the nature of my business was so confidential and so urgent that I felt you’d make an exception in my case.”
“Quite all right,” Mason said. “You talked things over with the girl at the switchboard and gave her an idea of what your business was — that always helps. It’s these people who are mysterious and refuse even to outline the general nature of their business who upset a day’s work. Now sit down and tell me just what you know about the Farr case.”
“I don’t know much about the Farr case but I know a lot about Nadine Farr.”
“All right, let’s have it,” Mason said, as Mrs. Newburn seated herself in the comfortable chair reserved for clients, and regarded Mason with steady, appraising eyes.
She was well-tailored, well-groomed, and her voice had the well-modulated timbre which one customarily associates with good breeding.
“I think first,” she said, “I should introduce myself. I am a niece of Mosher Higley.”
“You’re married?”
“Yes. My husband is in the oil business.”
“And you’ve been acquainted with Nadine Farr for how long?”
“A little over two years.”
“What is it you wish to tell me about her?”
She said, “Mr. Mason, I don’t want you to have the wool pulled over your eyes. Nadine is very, very adept at putting on an act, an act of sweet, cherubic innocence. She looks at you with wide-eyed sincerity, and all the time that little minx is wondering just how far she can twist you around her finger, and, believe me, she certainly means to twist you right around her finger. Everything that young woman does, every impulse she has is distinctly, decidedly, cold-bloodedly selfish.
“Now I understand that she’s been trying for one reason or another to make it appear that there was something sinister about the death of Uncle Mosher. There wasn’t. Uncle Mosher died of purely natural causes. He had a coronary thrombosis. The attending physician knows it, and that’s all there was to it.”
“Perhaps,” Mason said, “you misunderstood what Nadine was trying to do.”
“That’s entirely possible, Mr. Mason. Nadine hasn’t confided in me. She’s mysterious, secretive and furtive. She’ll twist every man in the world right around her fingers. She knows she can’t do it with alert women so she doesn’t try so hard with them. Occasionally you can catch her with her real character showing, if you’re a woman. With a man it’s virtually impossible. No matter what you do, she always resorts to that air of sweet innocence. She’ll look up helplessly, put herself entirely in your hands and somehow — and heaven knows how she does it with her background — appear shy and naive.
“I’m being catty, Mr. Mason. I’m not even going to try not to be. I’ll become more catty if I have to. I’ll claw and bite and I’ll fight.”
“What are you going to fight over?” Mason asked. “Are you by any chance feeling that your husband is straying off the reservation?”
Mrs. Newburn’s lips tightened. “Jackson,” she said, “like every other man I know, has completely fallen for her line. He thinks she’s just a sweet, innocent little girl who probably knows the facts of life but hasn’t applied them. He thinks that I’m persecuting her, that I’m jealous, that—”
“Is there anything to be jealous about?” Mason interrupted.
“I wish I knew,” she said. “Jackson is a male. He’s human. He has the predatory impulses which are part of the normal male temperament.
“Nadine doesn’t rely on the obvious come-hither approach. She uses the helpless, feminine technique, but, believe me, if she saw that anything, and I mean literally anything, was necessary to gain her ends she would only hesitate long enough to make it appear that her sweet innocence was being overcome by forces over which she had absolutely no control.
“And while I love Jackson, and respect him, if you’ll show me any normal male who wouldn’t fall for that line of approach, I’ll show you a man that I wouldn’t care to be married to. So there you are.
“Perhaps I am jealous. How do I know? However, that’s far afield from what I came to tell you.”