“Believe me, boy, when the second hand on that electric clock swung around to the sixtieth minute, I was on my way. And maybe you don’t think we burnt up the roads getting out to Hillgrade.”
“Good boy,” Mason said. “I knew I could count on you. Then what happened?”
Drake said, “I didn’t even bother to waste any time sizing up the lay of the land. I got to six-o-four East Hillgrade and saw lights in the house. I slammed the car to a stop right in front of the house, jumped out, and the three of us ran up the steps to the front porch and started jabbing the bell button. I could hear the doorbell jangling on the inside of the house, but nothing happened. So I pushed the door open. It was unlocked. We went in. You know what I found.”
Mason shook his head. “What did you find, Paul?”
Drake said, “There was a reception corridor with an arched entrance into a living room, and back of that a dining room and kitchen. Over on the other side was a door which led to a hallway. A light was on in the hallway, and the bedroom door was open. I was the one who walked down the hallway while the other boys took the living room and dining room. Believe me, I had my gun where I could reach it right quick. Okay, I get down to the second bedroom door. It’s open. I take a look inside. I see the top of a woman’s head, gray hair sprawled out over the floor. I see a left arm stretched out, and a right hand holding a gun. I let out a yell for the other boys, then I go over and make sure she’s dead. Then we go through the house looking for you. By that time, my gun’s out, and I’m having the jitters.
“We can’t find any trace of you anywhere, so I find a telephone and call the police and tell them to rush me out some radio officers and also to notify Homicide.”
“Mention my name?”
“No. I didn’t see where that would do any good. I knew they’d look things over pretty thoroughly. At the time, I thought it was suicide.”
“You don’t think so now?”
“I’m darned if I know what to think now. I’m beginning to swing over toward the murder theory.”
“What did the police say?”
“They wanted to know how I happened to go walking into the house at that time in the morning, and how I happened to find the body.”
“What did you tell them?”
Drake said apologetically, “I only had four or five minutes after I telephoned headquarters before the radio officers showed up. I didn’t have time to think up an absolutely iron-clad story. I could have improved it if I’d had a little more time. I...”
“What was it?” Mason asked.
“I couldn’t be absolutely certain who she was. Looking at things fast, it looked like an open-and-shut case of suicide. So I told the cops that I’d got a telephone message from a woman who said she wanted to tell me something before it was too late, that if I’d jump in my car and get out to that address fast, I’d find out something in connection with the Hocksley murder that would interest me.”
Mason grinned. “You couldn’t have done any better than that if you’d tried all night, Paul.”
Drake shook his head. “You overlook the weak point in it”
“What?”
“I didn’t see how I could tell them I’d stalled around very long after getting that telephone call. I didn’t know just when she’d pulled the trigger, but I surmised it had to be after she’d talked with you on the telephone. That would mean a medical examination would show she’d been dead for perhaps as much as an hour before I’d notified the cops. That wouldn’t look so well. So I told the cops I was working on something at the time which kept me from leaving the office, that I’d told her I’d be right out, but had put my car in the garage and there’d be a little delay. I felt that that way I could stall her along. That’s what I told the cops.”
“Go ahead,” Mason said.
“They wanted to know how long it was after the telephone conversation before I got there. I told them it might have been an hour, and I could see they didn’t believe that. They said that if I’d been on the track of something as important as that sounded, I’d have got out there sooner.”
“So then what?” Mason asked.
“So I told them that I hadn’t paid too much attention to time, that it had seemed quite a long while to me because I had so much to do, but that it might have been less than an hour; perhaps forty-five minutes, or perhaps even half an hour. And then I got myself in a jack pot. The times were all wet.”
Mason frowned. “You mean,” he said, “that she had been dead for more than...”
“She’d been dead ever since midnight,” Drake said, “and probably before.”
“How do they know?”
“Taking the temperature of the room and the temperature of the body and estimating how long it takes a body to lose a degree of heat, and all that stuff,” Drake said.
Mason frowned. “It couldn’t have been midnight. She talked with me over the telephone.”
“That’s what I thought,” Drake said, “but I wasn’t in a position to do any arguing.”
Mason said, “I guess that’s it, Paul.”
“What?”
“She was killed around midnight. That makes it murder.”
“But she talked with you and...”
“No,” Mason said. “A woman talked with me, a woman who had a rather well-bred voice. That is, the tones were smoothly harmonious, but there was something wrong with the way she spoke, as though she had a marble in her mouth. That explains it.”
“Explains what?” Drake asked.
Mason said, “It was a woman who talked with me. This woman said she was Mrs. Perlin. It was a cinch to pull that on me because I’d never heard Mrs. Perlin speak and didn’t know her voice. But the one who called the other person was one who said she was speaking for Mrs. Perlin because she was unable to come to the phone.”
“What other person?” Drake asked.
Mason said, “Right at the moment, Paul, that’s neither here nor there.”
The detective looked at him, sighed, and said, “It’s probably there, but it sure as hell ain’t here.”
Mason said, “When I looked down at the body, it didn’t seem to me that she’d been a woman who would have had a voice such as the one I’d heard on the telephone. So I asked — this other party — if the housekeeper had been up in the world at one time, and then had some bad luck. Had to go to housekeeping. That would have accounted for the well-bred voice, you know.”
“What was the answer?”
“Negative.”
Drake lit a cigarette. “That means,” he said, “that the party who was with you was someone who knew the housekeeper pretty well, someone who knew the housekeeper’s past, someone who was interested in the Hocksley case because a message brought that person out there. Probably a girl. Give me one guess, Perry.”
“Don’t take it,” Mason warned.
Drake removed the cigarette from his mouth, blew smoke at the smoldering end. “I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you, Perry, but there’s just a chance you and some feminine accomplice could be nominated for a murder rap. You might even be elected.”