“If the woman died before midnight?” Mason asked.
“That’s what you say.”
“I ought to know.”
Drake said, “If you’re going to keep messing around in murder cases, you’d better get married — so you’ll have some corroboration when it comes to bedtime alibis.”
“What the deuce are you talking about?” Mason said irritably. “Why the devil should I need an alibi?”
“Darned if I know,” Drake said, “but I have a hunch Lieutenant Tragg is going to become very inquisitive about what you were doing last night.”
“Tragg doesn’t even know I was anywhere within a mile of Hillgrade Avenue.”
Drake said, “Tragg gets around.”
Mason pushed back his chair. “You’ve been up all night, Paul. It gives you a pessimistic outlook.”
Drake regarded him moodily. He said, “You’re always pulling fast ones, and then expecting me to back your plays without telling me what it’s all about. I’m warning you that if Lieutenant Tragg finds out you were out at Hillgrade Avenue last night, or if he finds out the real reason why you didn’t call me back inside of an hour·, you’re going to have trouble.”
“What is the real reason I didn’t call you back inside of an hour?” Mason asked.
Drake regarded the lawyer thoughtfully. “If it’s what I think it is, I hope I’m not right.”
Mason laughed. “Come on. Out with it.”
Drake held up his left hand with the fingers extended. With the forefinger of his right hand, he checked off the points as he made them. “First,” he said, “you aren’t kidding me a bit. The reason you didn’t call me was because something very important did turn up. Two, that something important was of a nature which would interfere with a telephone call. Three, you didn’t discover anything from that contact which was particularly new. Otherwise, you’d have passed along the information, so I’d have something to work on. Four, it was a contact which knew a lot about the housekeeper, but one you had to keep absolutely dark. Five, it put you in such a spot that you don’t dare to confide even in me. You’re trying to kid me out of it. Now then, what’s the answer to those five points?”
Mason said, “I’ll bite, Mr. Bones. What is the answer to those five points?”
“Opal Sunley,” Drake said.
Mason got up. “I warned you not to make that guess, Paul. I try to keep you out in the clear and you jump right into the middle of the fire.”
Drake grinned. “I was in the frying pan, anyway,” he said.
Chapter 10
Della Street, humming a little tune as she opened the door to Mason’s private office, carrying the morning mail under her arm, stopped short with surprise, said, “Well, well, is this getting to be a habit?”
Mason grinned at her. “Come on over and sit down.”
She went back to close the door to the outer office. “What’s the idea?” she asked. “Been up all night?”
“No,” Mason said. “I got a few hours’ sleep. I guess that’s more than Drake did.”
“What happened?”
“A woman telephoned me about one o’clock in the morning, said she was Sarah Perlin, and she wanted to confess to the murder of R. E. Hocksley, wanted me to come at once to six-o-four East Hillgrade Avenue, said if she wasn’t there to wait until I saw a light, then open the back door and walk in. I took the precaution of telling Paul Drake to follow up in an hour if I didn’t telephone him everything was okay.”
“How did she get in touch with you?” Della Street asked.
“She called Paul Drake, and Paul held her on the line while he got in touch with me. I told Paul to give her my private number.”
“This was Mrs. Perlin, Hocksley’s housekeeper?”
“The voice said it was Mrs. Perlin. I don’t think it was.”
“Why not?”
“I think Mrs. Perlin was dead at the time. When I got out to the house on Hillgrade, I found her lying on the floor with a gun in her right hand and a bullet through her heart. It could have been suicide.”
“Did you report to the police?”
“Not directly,” Mason said. “I had other fish to fry. Opal Sunley came wandering in with a story that was just about as wild as mine. I didn’t realize how utterly incredible my story would sound to Lieutenant Tragg until I heard Opal Sunley telling me her version of about the same thing.”
“What did you do?”
Mason grinned. “I let Paul Drake hold the sack,” he said. “The hour was about up. Opal Sunley offered to play square if I wouldn’t notify the police, but give her a chance for a getaway.”
“Isn’t that compounding a felony?”
“It most certainly is — if she was guilty of a felony.”
“And how about not reporting the finding of the body?”
“I can get by with that in a pinch because I knew that Drake was on his way up. It only made a difference of a few minutes. The thing that bothers me is this Sunley woman.”
“What did you do with her?”
“Took her to a night spot and tried to get her tight.”
“Do any good?”
Mason shook his head. “She is a very bright young woman, or else I telegraphed my punch pretty badly. She started taking defensive measures even before I’d ordered the first drink.”
“What were the defensive measures?” Della Street asked. “I might have occasion to use them sometime.”
“Crackers and butter,” Mason said, “and lots of butter. She’d eaten about five squares before I got the first cocktail into her. After that, I knew it wouldn’t be much use.”
“Evidently the young woman knows her way around,” Della Street said.
Mason nodded. “I got her telephone number — Acton one-one-one-one-o.”
“What did she tell you about young Gentrie?”
“Not a great deal. Young Arthur Gentrie is madly in love with her. She’s older than he is and considers it a case of puppy love, but doesn’t want to destroy his illusions. She says that it’s very, very serious when a young man starts putting an older woman on a pedestal and becomes really infatuated for the first time in his life.”
“Is it the first time with Junior Gentrie?” Della Street asked.
Mason said, “He told her it was.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“He said there’d been puppy loves in his life before, but nothing that could approach the devastating effect of this feeling that he has for her.”
“And so she keeps on going out with him and encouraging him?”
“She says she isn’t encouraging him. She’s trying to be an older sister to him, but Junior won’t, as she expresses it, cool off. She said she had been trying to find some younger woman who would be sufficiently attractive to Junior to get his mind into what she calls a more normal state. The hell of it is, Della, she’s got a boy friend — some chap she’s crazy over — and she’s keeping all this about young Gentrie away from her regular boy friend because he’s insanely jealous. Of course, she’s also keeping all news of the boy friend from Gentrie because she doesn’t want to destroy his illusions.”
Della Street said, “It’s nice business if you can get it. How old is she?”
“Around twenty-two or twenty-three according to her looks, but something she said made me place her at about twenty-five.”
“What did Opal Sunley tell you about what happened in Hocksley’s flat?”
“According to her story, she arrived for work at the usual time in the morning, saw bloodstains, went out to look at the automobiles, saw that someone had been riding in the back of Hocksley’s automobile, and spilling blood. She couldn’t find either Hocksley or Mrs. Perlin. So she notified the police.”