“From him to you?” Della asked.
Mason thought for a moment, then smiled and said, “Both ways... We’re getting into a deep subject, Della, but somehow when you shake hands with a man you can tell a lot about him from his grip. There’s a certain magnetic something you can feel.”
“I know,” she said. “Some hands are firm and sincere and others are — well, sort of evasive; it’s hard to describe.”
Mason was thoughtful. “Shaking hands is a peculiar custom. It consists in clasping a part of two bodies together so that a vibration or magnetism or whatever you want to call it is exchanged from one to the other... Well, we’d better go to work.”
Della Street shook her head. “You had two appointments for this morning, and when I didn’t hear from you Friday afternoon I canceled them.”
“I should have let you know,” Mason said, “but I got up there and had this session with the Escobar Import and Export Company and I had a peculiar experience.”
“What?”
“One of the stenographers left this note with my name on it beside a piece of carved ivory I had been looking at.”
“Oh, oh,” Della Street said. “So that’s why you stayed over in San Francisco Friday night!”
Mason grinned. “It wasn’t that kind of a note. Take a look.”
The lawyer took the note from his notebook. Della Street looked at it, said, “I think it was done on an electric typewriter. Did you notice which of the secretaries had electric typewriters?”
“I didn’t,” Mason said. “I was noticing the decorations in the office — figurines, carved ivories, jade. They must have had half a million dollars’ worth of stuff on display.”
“Did they offer you anything at a discount?”
“Wholesale only,” Mason said thoughtfully. “I’d like to know something about who their customers are and I’d like to know a lot more about where they get their stuff... You say you canceled all my appointments for this morning?”
“That’s right. They weren’t important, and I rang up Friday afternoon and canceled.”
Mason said, “After I got out of the Import and Export Company I went out to Fisherman’s Wharf and had a good crab lunch — or I guess you’d call it dinner — and then went down to the airport... Friday afternoon at a San Francisco airport. I was lucky to get home at all. I didn’t get in until five-fifteen and then I didn’t want to bother you... I’m going down to Paul Drake’s office and see if our stakeout has heard anything.”
“Our stakeout?”
“Stella Grimes,” Mason said, “the operative who’s registered under the name of Diana Deering at the Willatson Hotel. Somehow I have an idea we may be a bit behind on developments.
“For your information Franklin Gage seemed to adopt a rather casual attitude toward a shortage of twenty thousand dollars. Actually it was only ten thousand, because Franklin had taken out ten thousand to use in a business deal that he hadn’t consummated, and he had put the money back when he came in the office Friday morning.”
“But he reported what he had done?”
“Yes, as soon as his nephew told him there was a shortage.”
“Well, that was opportune,” Della Street said.
Mason nodded. “The way they keep their cash is certainly cool and casual. I have an idea that Franklin Gage would a lot rather absorb a reasonable loss than have the matter come into court where he would be cross-examined about the reason they keep such a large amount of cash on hand and what they do with it... There could be an income-tax angle there, too... and I’m willing to bet there’s a lot of customs regulations that are being by-passed.”
“You think they’re smuggling?”
“I think people with whom they deal are smuggling, and there’s an atmosphere of complete irregularity about the whole thing... Some of those art objects they have on display are really beautiful... I’m going down and have a chat with Paul Drake for a minute, Della. I think he’s in this morning. Then I’ll come back and get my nose ready for the grindstone.”
“You have three rather important appointments this afternoon,” she reminded him.
“Okay,” Mason said, “I’ll take a quick look; then back to the salt mines... I guess Edgar Douglas’ funeral is this morning. After that we may hear from Diana. And then again we may never hear from her again. I have an idea our Franklin Gage will be at the funeral, and he may tell Diana the whole embezzlement idea was a false alarm.
“Diana certainly looked a wreck. She had taken a plane up from Los Angeles, gone to the hospital, was with her brother when he died about three o’clock in the morning; then had to make funeral arrangements and meet me at the Escobar Import and Export Company at ten-thirty and — say, wait a minute, I told her to get a cashier’s check. She had it for me.”
Mason took the leather wallet from his inside coat pocket, pulled out several papers, and said, “Well, here it is. A cashier’s check made by the Farmers’ Financial Bank of San Francisco to Diana Douglas as trustee in an amount of five thousand dollars. She may have cut corners with us, Della, but she followed instructions on that check at a time when her heart must have been torn to ribbons. She was really fond of that brother of hers. I guess she’s sort of been a mother to him as well as a sister... If anything turns up in the next ten minutes, I’ll be down at Paul Drake’s office.”
“No hurry,” Della Street said. “I’ll call if there’s anything important.”
Mason walked down the corridor to the offices of the Drake Detective Agency, said hello to the girl at the switchboard, and jerked his thumb in the direction of Paul Drake’s office.
She smiled in recognition, nodded, and said, “He’s in. He’s on the phone at the moment. Go on down.”
Mason opened the spring-locked gate in the partition which divided the waiting room from the offices and walked down the long corridor, flagged by little offices in which Drake’s operatives made out their reports, until he came to Drake’s office.
Paul Drake was sitting in his little cubbyhole behind a desk on which were several telephones. He was just completing a telephone conversation when Mason opened the door.
The detective indicated a chair and said, “Hi, Perry. This is intended as a place of command from which to direct multitudinous activities, not as a place of consultation.”
Mason settled himself in the chair. “What have you got on those phones — a hot line to police headquarters?”
“Darned near,” Drake said. “We handle a lot of the stuff at the switchboard, but on delicate assignments when we have cars cruising with telephones in them, there are lots of times when there just isn’t time to go through a switchboard. I give the operatives an unlisted number. They can call me direct and be absolutely certain that they’re going to get me here.”
“But suppose you’re not here?” Mason asked.
“Then there’s a signal on the switchboard and the switchboard can pick it up, but I’m usually here. When you run a job like this you have to sit on top of it, and that’s particularly true with men who are cruising with cars that have telephones... What’s on your mind, Perry?”
“This thirty-six-twenty-four-thirty-six case,” Mason said. “Diana Douglas is the sort of girl who will go to a doctor to get medicine for the flu; then go home, take the advice of the janitor, take two aspirins with a hot lemonade, and throw out the doctor’s medicine. Then a friend will drop in who’ll tell her that what she needs is a lot of vitamin C and whiskey; so she’ll take five hundred units of vitamin C and a hot toddy. Then somebody will tell her she needs hot tea and quinine and she’ll take that. Then when the doctor comes to see how she’s getting along she’ll push the whiskey bottle and the teapot under the bed so he won’t know she’s taken anything on her own and say, ‘Doctor, I feel terrible!’ ”