Mrs. Newburn got up from her chair, started to say something, changed her mind, walked uncertainly toward the door, turned back and said, “Well, if Uncle Mosher left any oil property, we’re entitled to it. I suppose you feel I’m a cat, Mr. Mason.”
“I would say you had a dietary deficiency,” Mason said, smiling frostily.
“How come?”
“You don’t eat enough of the foods which generate the milk of human kindness.”
Suddenly angry, she glared at him. “Well, you just wait until you’ve had a little more experience with that baby-faced bitch and... well, see what you think then!” she spat
She flounced out of the door.
Chapter Eight
Della Street unlocked the door of Mason’s office to find the lawyer reading advance copies of the Supreme Court reports.
“Well, how was the trip, Della?”
She laughed. “I had visions of spending a few days at the beach, getting a sun tan and a little surf bathing.”
Mason said, “And I had visions of a beautiful legal battle with Hamilton Burger over corpus delicti, legal medicine and professional ethics.”
“And now everything has blown up?”
Mason nodded.
“Just what happened?”
“Well,” Mason said, “it turns out that we’ve had a tempest in a teapot. Nadine Farr found an extra bottle of sweetening pills on the shelf. It never occurred to her that it wasn’t the regular bottle she had been using until Mosher Higley tasted the chocolate, suddenly became convulsed with pain and accused her of having poisoned him. She dashed down to her room, looked in the place where she had secreted the cyanide tablets, and found they were gone. That was when she found out that she had taken tablets from an extra bottle in the kitchen that she hadn’t noticed before.
“Of course, in view of Higley’s accusation, she reached what seemed to her to be a thoroughly logical conclusion — that someone had put the cyanide tablets where she would naturally place them in Higley’s drink and poison the old man.”
“But she hadn’t?” Della Street asked.
Mason grinned. “She had a guilty conscience. She jumped at conclusions from insufficient data. That’s the worst of circumstantial evidence, Della. You grab a button and sew a vest on it and then think the button must have come off the vest.”
“But what do you suppose did become of the cyanide tablets Nadine Farr placed in her room?”
“That,” Mason said, “is something we’ll have to investigate quietly, tactfully and rapidly. Naturally it isn’t a good idea for a young woman who has entertained suicidal thoughts to remain in possession of a collection of cyanide tablets, although I think the incentive for suicide has now passed.”
“Chief, what in the world do you suppose was back of Higley’s persecution of Nadine Farr? Think of a man telling a young girl who was in love that she must go away and never communicate with the man she loved, that she must never see him again.”
“That,” Mason said, “isn’t the significant thing.”
“What is?”
“The fact that she was going to do it.”
“She wasn’t.”
“She was going to kill herself, which amounts to the same thing.”
“Higley must have been a devil.”
Mason said, “I don’t like to judge Higley on the strength of Nadine Farr’s statements. Higley is dead. He can’t defend himself. Nadine Farr hated him. Oh well, that’s all water under the bridge now. What did you do with Nadine?”
“I left her down at the beach.”
Mason raised his eyebrows.
“She wanted to stay. She’d been under quite a strain and when I told her that everything was all right she had quite a reaction. You know how she is. She won’t cry. She keeps her emotions all bottled up inside herself. That’s why she’s under such terrific tension.”
“And she didn’t want to go back home?”
“No, she said she didn’t want to face anyone for a little while. She said that since the rooms were already paid for she’d stay down there overnight and take a bus in the morning.”
“You think she’ll be all right, Della?”
“I think so. It’s hard to judge her, but she said she’d be fine. It was my idea that perhaps she wanted to telephone John Locke and have him meet her. She wanted to be the one to tell him — before he heard a garbled version from someone else.”
Mason nodded. “That’s probably it. Well, we may as well call it a day and—”
Paul Drake’s code knock sounded insistently urgent on the outer door.
Della Street raised her eyebrows in silent interrogation.
Mason nodded.
Della Street went over to open the door. “Hi, Paul,” she said. “We were just calling it a day. What is it? You look all excited.”
Drake closed the door, walked over to the clients’ chair, and for once didn’t sprawl out crossways but sat straight and erect. His eyes searched those of Perry Mason.
“Perry,” he said, “would you pull a fast one without telling me about it?”
“What seems to be the trouble, Paul?”
“Look, Perry, you’re in a real jam this time. It looks as though they’ve caught you with the goods.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m just wondering,” Drake said, “if you are crazy enough to do it.”
“To do what?”
“Throw that bottle out into Twomby’s Lake and then pay a boy to recover it.”
“Now wouldn’t that be something!” Mason said. “Do you mean to tell me, Paul, that Hamilton Burger is insinuating I did that?”
“He hasn’t specifically accused you as yet. He may later on. At the moment he’s dealing only in innuendoes.”
“And what’s given him all those ideas?” Mason asked.
Drake said, “Of course, you have to admit, Perry, that dredging out that bottle which Nadine Farr insisted contained cyanide of potassium and—”
“She didn’t insist on it,” Mason said. “She simply thought it might have contained cyanide tablets.”
“According to the way I heard it,” Drake said, “she told the doctor positively and absolutely that the bottle contained cyanide.”
“Well, you can hear lots of things,” Mason said, “but what interests me at the moment is what has caused you to become so steamed up and imbued with the idea that I planted this bottle of evidence.”
“They found the other bottle,” Drake said.
“What!” Mason exclaimed.
“After you walked out of police headquarters, leaving Lieutenant Tragg and Hamilton Burger sitting there with their mouths open, Burger began to get an idea that this might have been one of your fast ones.
“Lieutenant Tragg contacted the car dispatcher and they sent a radio car hurrying out to Twomby’s Lake. The cops started kids diving all over again and this time they found the bottle.”
“What do you mean, the bottle?”
“Well, call it a bottle,” Drake said. “Anyway, they found another bottle.”
“And what about this one?”
“This was the same type of bottle as the other. It had shot and tablets in it, but these tablets were cyanide of potassium.”
“The devil!” Mason exclaimed.
“That’s right. Look at the thing from Hamilton Burger’s viewpoint. He feels he has you dead to rights. Of course, Perry, I know that you have unorthodox, unconventional ideas about the cross-examination of witnesses, but if you fixed up a bottle with sugar substitute pills and shot, then went out and tossed it off the end of the pier so the boys could recover it and thereby kill the case against Nadine Farr, you really and truly stuck your neck out.”