Muriell left the room, closing the door gently, went back down to the dining room. It was the cook’s day off but the maid who came in by the hour would be in later and clean up the dishes.
Once more a feeling of uneasiness possessed Muriell as she looked at the dining-room table, the one egg on the plate, the sausage, the newspaper on the floor. It was so unlike her father to leave without saying good-by, so unlike him to be inconsiderate even in little things, and he knew that Muriell was out in the kitchen...
And then she saw his brief case.
Under no circumstances would her father have left for the office without his brief case. She knew that he had some papers in it he had been working on the night before and he expected to do some dictation on those papers the first thing at his office. He had even taken the cardboard jacket containing the agreements out of the brief case at the breakfast table long enough to verify some point, and had made a notation.
Muriell crossed the room, picked it up and opened it.
The agreements, stapled in their legal-looking blue covers, were in the brief case.
Muriell pulled them out, looked at them and then saw a notation on the cardboard jacket in which the agreements had been placed.
The notation was in her father’s handwriting. It read: “In case of any emergency call Perry Mason, the attorney, at once. Call no one else.”
The memo had her father’s initials on it and was written in ink. There was a slight smear on the last initial, as though the filing jacket had been hurriedly replaced in the brief case before the ink had had an opportunity to dry. There was also a telephone number, presumably that of Perry Mason’s office.
Could this have been what her father had been writing at the breakfast table?
Muriell looked at her watch. It was ten minutes before nine. She replaced the brief case, went back to the dining room and then, approaching the table, suddenly realized that her father’s napkin wasn’t on either the chair or the table. Her quick search revealed that it was nowhere in sight. Wherever her father had gone, he had taken his napkin with him.
Suddenly the significance of that missing napkin impressed itself on Muriell’s mind and once more aroused all of her fears. She looked under the newspaper, under the table, through the dining room, even out to the reception hall near the front door and then up the carpeted stairs toward the second floor. It was then she thought of the workshop.
Of course!
Back of the house was a huge, long, single-story building which contained three garages on the north end. Then to the south of the last garage there was a darkroom where Nancy did her developing and enlarging and, immediately to the south of the darkroom, the last room in the building was a workshop where Carter Gilman indulged in his twin hobbies — working with modeling clay and making wooden objects, inlaid cigarette cases of rare woods, jewel cases, sewing boxes and various ornamental gadgets.
Muriell made no effort to check the swinging door this time as she dashed from the dining room into the kitchen, then out the back door of the kitchen to the screened porch, out of the door from the screened porch, across a strip of lawn to the door which opened into her father’s workshop.
She flung open the door, called, “Daddy!”
Stepping inside, she came to a sudden halt.
A chair had been overturned and broken. A sinister red pool had spread out over the cement floor.
The floor, spotted here and there with fine sawdust, was literally covered with currency. The bills were all in a denomination of one hundred dollars and to Muriell’s startled eyes there seemed to be hundreds of them.
On the other side of the room, to her right, was a door which opened into Nancy’s darkroom. In front of this door on the cement floor was her father’s missing napkin.
Muriell stepped over the napkin, pushed open the door of the darkroom.
The acrid smell of fixing bath assailed her nostrils. Light, coming from the open door, served only to intensify the shadows at the far end of the room.
“Daddy!” Muriell called.
Silence engulfed her voice.
Muriell crossed the darkroom to fling open the door which led to the garages.
The sports car and the club coupe were there in their proper places, but the sedan was missing.
Muriell, her heart still thumping, considered the problem of the missing sedan. Her father must have left the dining-room table, gone to the garage still carrying his napkin. Some sudden emergency had taken him out there before he realized the napkin was in his hand.
He must have gone to the garage first, from the garage through the door to the darkroom, then crossed the darkroom and opened the door to the workshop.
What he had seen in the workshop had caused him to drop the napkin.
Then what had happened? What was the significance of the overturned, broken chair? What was the significance of the money spread all over the floor, and above all, that spreading red pool?
Muriell, reaching a sudden decision, hurried to the telephone on the counter of Carter Gilman’s woodworking shop, depressed the button which gave her an outside line and called her father’s office. When she learned her father was not there, she hurriedly leafed through the phone book on the counter and dialed the number of Perry Mason’s office.
The voice that answered the telephone assured her that Mr. Mason was not in but that his secretary was there.
“I’ll talk with his secretary,” Muriell said.
A moment later a reassuringly competent voice said, “This is Della Street, Mr. Mason’s confidential secretary.”
Muriel poured words into the telephone. “I suppose I’m completely crazy,” she said, “but my father has disappeared. I found a note in his brief case to call Mr. Mason in the event of any unexpected development and... well, there’s just something mysterious about the whole thing. I—”
“May I ask your father’s name, please?”
“Carter Gilman. My mother is dead. I’m living here with him and my stepmother and her daughter. We—”
“Your name, please?”
“Muriell Gilman.”
“Can you give me your telephone number?”
Muriell gave it to her.
“And the address?”
“6231 Vauxman Avenue.”
“Mr. Mason just came in,” Della Street said. “I’ll call you back within five minutes.”
“Thank you,” Muriell said, and hung up.
Chapter Two
Perry Mason, walking over to his office desk, grinned at Della Street, eyed the pile of mail on his desk with distaste, said, “Who is that you are promising to call back, Della?”
“A Muriell Gilman. Her father is Carter Gilman. I wanted to check the card index of clients, but I don’t think we have anything on him.”
Mason frowned a moment thoughtfully, then said, “There was a Gilman on one of my juries not too long ago. I’ve forgotten the first name. What’s it all about, Della?”
“His daughter thinks he’s disappeared.”
“Gilman... Gilman... Carter Gilman. That name sounds familiar. Look him up in the jury cards, Della. I think he was one of the jurors in that case where it turned out there had been a mistaken identification.”
Della Street moved over to the card index. Her nimble fingers ran through the cards of Mason’s confidential file of jurors and said, “Yes, here he is. Carter Gilman. He was a juror on that Jones case. You have him marked as exceptional. It’s the same address, 6231 Vauxman Avenue. Now wait a minute. Vauxman Avenue — that rings a bell.”
Della Street turned from the file, opened the appointment book, said, “A man who gave his name as Edward Carter telephoned yesterday and asked for an appointment sometime today. I gave him an eleven-thirty appointment. I asked him for the address and he said he was visiting here in the city with friends on Vauxman Avenue. Let me look up the number.