“That’s generally the plan you had worked out. By following it, you’ve bought yourself a one-way ticket to the gas chamber. Your secretary is loyal and she’d do just about anything you asked her, but when she finds out that she’s given a choice of being an accessory after the fact in a murder or telling the police the truth, she’ll tell the truth. They’re probably grilling her right now.
“If you’d called me as soon as it happened and had given me the facts, I might have been able to do something to help you. We might at least have made it look like manslaughter or second-degree murder. But now, with all this elaborate skulduggery you’ve worked out, you’ve made the whole thing appear to be premeditated murder and they’re going to get a verdict of first-degree murder.”
Mason quit talking and let his eyes bore into Gilman’s panic-stricken eyes.
“Well?” Mason asked at length.
Gilman shook his head.
“All right,” Mason said, “What’s the truth?”
“I’ll tell it to you,” Gilman said, “but I won’t tell it to any other living soul. I won’t go on the witness stand. I won’t even admit it if you should ask me.”
“All right,” Mason said. “Go on, tell me what happened.”
“I’m... I’m protecting someone; someone I love very much.”
“Who?” Mason asked.
Gilman shook his head.
“Who?” Mason asked.
“All right,” Gilman blurted, “I’m protecting a member of my family.”
“That’s a little better,” Mason said. “Now perhaps we can do something. Tell me what happened.”
“I was eating breakfast,” Gilman said. “I knew that Vera Martel was trying to find out something about the family.”
“How did you know that?”
“I’ll come to that in a minute.”
“All right,” Mason said. “What happened at breakfast?”
“I saw Vera Martel hurry down the driveway and enter Nancy’s darkroom.”
“Go on,” Mason said.
“I was absolutely thunderstruck,” Gilman said, “to think that she would come to my house. I knew then that the situation was very desperate, that there was something in the nature of a pay-off that was taking place.
“I intended to go down the driveway and have a showdown with Vera Martel.
“Now, this is important, Mr. Mason, and you must remember it. In order to keep from arousing Muriell’s suspicions I didn’t dare to sit there just looking out the window. I had to be pretending to read my paper, so I can’t swear to exactly what happened. I was looking at the paper part of the time.”
“Go on.”
“I got Muriell out in the kitchen cooking and I got up quietly from the table, dropped the paper on the floor and was about to tiptoe out of the front door when I looked out of the window and saw...”
“Yes,” Mason said.
“I saw a member of my family running from the workshop with a face that was indicative of panic.”
“Who was it?” Mason asked.
Gilman shook his head. “I’ll never tell even you that, Mason, because I know that if you take my case you’re going to try to save my bacon, and as an ethical lawyer you’ll save it at the expense of anyone whom you think is guilty.”
“All right,” Mason said, “we’ll let it go at that for a while. You saw a member of your family coming out of the workshop. So then what happened?”
“Then I hurried out of the front door. I ran on tiptoe along the cement driveway. I opened the door to the darkroom and hurried across the darkroom to the door to the workshop. I opened that and at what I saw nearly fainted.”
“What did you see?”
“There was a pool of crimson on the floor which at first I took to be blood. There was a broken chair. There was money all over the floor of the workshop — hundred-dollar bills just scattered everywhere.”
“All right, go on,” Mason said. “What did you do?”
“I dropped my napkin, I guess. I just stood there. Then I saw that the pool of red I had thought was blood was actually red enamel which was leaking from the loose cap of a can of red enamel which had been knocked off the workbench. I went over and picked up the can and put it back on the shelf right side up. Then I realized what must have happened.”
“What must have happened?” Mason asked.
“This member of my family had gone out with a lot of money in hundred-dollar bills to pay for blackmail and... well, Vera Martel had raised the ante and there had been violence.”
“So what did you do? Did you ask this member of the family about it?”
“I did not,” Gilman said. “I ran and jumped in my car and started the motor and started looking for Vera Martel. I knew she couldn’t have gone far. I circled the block, then I cruised around the various streets and I couldn’t find her, but I did find her car parked within a half a block of the house.”
“How did you know it was her car?”
“It had a Nevada license on it.”
“How did you know it was her car?” Mason asked.
“It... all right, I’ll tell you the rest of it. Roger Calhoun did hire Vera Martel to find out something about a scandal in the family. My secretary, Matilda Norman, who has been with me for some time and is intensely loyal, found out about it from Roger’s secretary when a few words came in over the intercom before Calhoun realized it was open. For your information, Roger Calhoun’s secretary, Miss Colfax, hates his guts, but she has to play up to him because she’s drawing about twice the ordinary salary. However, she found out enough to know that Roger had Vera Martel in there and was going to pay her money to find out something about the family and she knew that Vera Martel came from Nevada.”
“So what?”
“So she came and told Matilda Norman, and Tillie told me.”
“And you,” Mason asked, “busted in on Calhoun and Vera Martel and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing?”
“That’s what I should have done,” Gilman said. “I’m afraid I did the wrong thing.”
“What did you do?”
“I wanted to find out more about what was going on, so I went down to the parking lot and looked around for cars with a Nevada license. I found one and I really gave it the works. I found keys in a key container in the lock and looked in the key container and found an identifying tag of Vera Martel with a Las Vegas address.”
“Go on,” Mason said.
“There was some modeling clay in my car. I went over to it, took out the clay and made an impression of the keys in the key container.”
“What did you do that for?” Mason asked.
“I simply don’t know,” Gilman said. “I just wanted to find out everything I could. I was in a panic at the idea that some scandal might be uncovered in connection with my family.
“I’ve known for a long time that there might have been something a little irregular — that is, a little premature about the birth of Glamis, but... that wouldn’t have been enough. It had to be something in addition to that, and I wanted to find out what it was.”
“So you got the idea that while Vera Martel was available you’d make duplicate keys and go over and search her office?”
Gilman hesitated a moment, then nodded.
“You certainly have stuck your neck in a noose,” Mason said. “Is that what you were doing last night?”
“Yes.”
“What did you find?”
“I found that somebody had beat me to it,” Gilman blurted. “The office was a wreck. Papers were scattered all over the floor. You couldn’t find anything in the filing case in any kind of order. All of the papers had been mixed up. Someone had pulled everything out and just thrown them helter-skelter on the floor.”