“What, for instance?”
“Things — complications that would be brought about by what’s happened here. Don’t you see. They’d think that Mrs. Perlin and I had worked together to get Mr. Hocksley out of the way.”
“Why should you want him out of the way?”
“I don’t know. I only know that’s what they’d say. It looks as though I must have had some connection with Mrs. Perlin, as though she’d communicated with me sometime today, and I hadn’t told the police.”
“She did communicate with you, didn’t she?”
“Well, in a way, yes.”
“And you didn’t tell the police?”
“She told me not to.”
Mason looked at his watch, hesitated a moment, then said, “If I do this for you, what’ll you do for me?”
She met his eyes without flinching. “What do you want?” she asked.
Mason said, “I don’t want you to run out on me if the going gets tough.”
“All right.”
“You’ll stick?”
“Yes — only — only don’t kid me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t tell me that you’re going to give me a break, and then as soon as I’ve left, call the police.”
Mason said, “As far as that’s concerned, I’ll go you one better. I know a roadhouse that’s still open. I’ll buy you a drink, and a sandwich, and you can watch me to make certain I don’t even go near a telephone.”
She hugged his arm. “You don’t know what this means to me! It — it means everything!”
Mason said, “Okay, let’s go.”
“Shouldn’t we — turn the lights off?”
“No,” Mason said. “Leave things just as they are.”
“But I’m the one who turned the lights on.”
“All right, leave them that way.”
“How about locking the doors?”
“No. Leave them just the way they are.”
“Why?”
“Suppose something happens. Suppose we’re picked up within a block by a prowl car. Suppose someone sees us leaving. We tell our story, and police find the doors locked.”
“I see. Look here, we have two cars. We can’t...”
Mason said, “You get in my car. I drive you up to your car. You get in, turn it around, and follow me for four or five blocks, park your car, get out, and go to the nightclub with me. I bring you back to where your car is parked. In that way, you’ll know I’m not doing any telephoning.”
Looking up, she said, “I think you’re wonderful. I can’t imagine why you’re doing this for me.”
Mason said, “Neither can I.”
Chapter 9
Paul Drake, his face gray with fatigue and worry, looked across the desk at Perry Mason, and said, “Some day when you play me for a sucker, I’m going to wriggle off the hook.”
The lawyer raised his eyebrows. “Why, Paul, what’s the idea?”
“You know darn well what the idea is,” Drake said.
“You mean piling so much work on you I kept you up all night?” Mason asked. “Shucks, think of me. I was pulled out of bed around one o’clock in the morning to go out on a wild-goose chase.”
Drake said, “And I suppose you haven’t heard anything at all about the wild goose?”
Mason said, “Spill it. What’s on your mind, Paul?”
Drake said sarcastically, “Oh, no, you don’t know what it’s all about. You haven’t the faintest idea. You wouldn’t have got me in a jam for worlds.”
“What the devil are you talking about, Paul?”
“Why didn’t you telephone me?”
“When?”
“When! When you said you were going to.”
“Why, did I say...”
“How about that date to go out and save your bacon at Hillgrade Avenue if you didn’t call inside of an hour?”
Mason said, “I had some trouble, Paul. I was talking with a witness. I couldn’t break away to get to a telephone without jeopardizing the whole thing. And after all, it only meant a trip out to Hillgrade Avenue for you. That was only a matter of twenty minutes, and it was better to send you on a wild-goose chase than to jeopardize what I was working on.”
“Oh, yes, a wild-goose chase,” Drake said. “I see.”
“Well,” Mason said, “that was the way it looked to me. House standing there, gloomy and sedate, with a light or two in it, but no one to answer the doorbell.”
“And the doors all unlocked and waiting for you to go right on in?” Drake asked.
Mason shook his head. “Not me.”
“Why not?”
“Be your age, Paul. Somebody rings you up at one o’clock, tells you to go to a certain address, and walk right into a house you’ve never seen before. You go blundering on in. Someone comes out with a double-barreled shotgun, says, ‘Burglars, eh,’ and lets you have both loads of buckshot right in the middle of your stomach. No, thank you. None of that in mine. They answer bells or I don’t open doors.”
“You mean to say you didn’t go in?”
“I mean to say I don’t make a practice of having strangers tell me to go out to some residence and walk right in. But what are you crabbing about? You had a wild-goose chase out there, and that was all. You got back in twenty or thirty minutes. You found out that I wasn’t there. You knew I’d either been kidnaped, or was working on some new angle of the case.”
Drake said sarcastically, “Oh, yes. It’s nothing to me, just the few minutes necessary to run out there and back.”
“Well, what are you beefing about?” Mason asked, letting a note of impatience creep into his voice.
Drake said, “I don’t suppose you went inside. I don’t suppose you found the body and didn’t want to take the responsibility of telephoning the police and trying to explain to them how it happened you were out there. I don’t suppose you decided you’d discovered enough bodies and that it would be a smart idea to let Paul Drake take the rap on this one. You knew damn well I’d have some hard-boiled detectives on my staff who would bust right on into that house. You knew damn well I’d find the corpse, and when I found it, I’d have to telephone the police.”
Mason said, “What body?”
“Oh, I don’t suppose you knew there was a body in the house?”
“What about the body? Who was it?”
“Apparently,” Drake said, “it’s the body of Mrs. Sarah Perlin, the housekeeper for Hocksley. She may have committed suicide, and she may have been shot.”
Mason said excitedly, “You mean she was actually in that house?”
“Of course, she was in that house, in a bedroom in front of her dressing table. After the shot had been fired, she’d slumped down on the floor. Her own gun did the job.”
Mason’s face held an expression of puzzled surprise. “Paul, you’re not kidding me about this? You mean she was there?”
“Of course, she was there.”
“And that’s who it was? What I mean is, the body’s been identified?”
Drake nodded.
“Then she must have been killed after she telephoned me and... Gosh, Paul, she said she wanted to confess. She must have telephoned me then started getting ready to meet me. The thought of what she’d done began preying on her mind, and she decided on suicide. What is there that indicates it wasn’t a suicide?”
“The course of the bullet, and position of the body,” Drake said.
“Tell me what happened, Paul.”
“I waited for you to telephone. At first I didn’t think very much of it. Just a matter of routine. Then when about forty-five minutes had gone by and you hadn’t phoned, I began to worry. After all, it could pretty easily have been a trap. You work on a case in an unorthodox manner. You keep two or three jumps ahead of the police. You’re usually pretty close to the murderer. A man who was being crowded could bump you off, and, by shutting your lips, might save himself a one-way trip to the gas chamber at San Quentin. One o’clock in the morning was a hell of a time to be calling a lawyer out of bed. The more I thought of it, the less I liked it. I rounded up a couple of tough operatives and sat here with my eye glued on the clock. Somehow, I had a feeling in my bones you weren’t going to call. I wanted to get started. I felt that seconds were precious, but you’d said an hour, so I decided to give you the full hour.