Mason glanced at Della Street, nodded.
“We went home,” Eden said, “and went in my side of the house. We saw a man lying there in the living room and ran down, and it was the body of Loring Carson. He was lying there with a knife in his back, and he had evidently been stabbed by someone who had jabbed the knife into his back from the other side of the barbed-wire fence.
“It was a horrible predicament. Vivian recognized the knife as belonging to the set in the kitchen. And we had found the body together and we simply couldn’t go to the police and tell them we had been out together — spent the night together — had trouble with Loring Carson, and then discovered his body.
“So I told Vivian that I’d drive her to her apartment and we’d hide Loring’s car in her garage where it would be safe until dark, and then we’d leave it someplace where it could be found. Then I said I’d drive her up to the garage where her car was being repaired, that she could drive her car, that we could buy another knife to take the place of the knife that was missing from the kitchen and that I’d come out there to meet with the newspaper reporters at the time you had called the news conference, and that we’d all go into the house and that they could discover the body of Loring Carson at that time.
“I realize now it was a fool thing to do. We should have gone to the police and taken them into our confidence but... well, that’s the way it was. After we’d once started covering up we could never have told the truth. No jury on earth would ever have believed us. It was up to you to take the case the way it was and go at it blind.”
“I see,” Mason said. “I—”
The telephone on Mason’s desk jangled in a series of short sharp rings.
“That’s Gertie’s signal that Lieutenant Tragg is barging his way in and—”
The door opened and Tragg stood on the threshold.
“Well, well, well,” he said, “I seem to be interrupting a conference.”
“You not only seem to be, you are,” Mason said.
“Well, that’s too bad,” Tragg said.
“And I may point out,” Mason said, “that having been acquitted of the murder of Loring Carson, my clients are of no further interest to the police, so your inopportune entry is all the more inexcusable.”
Tragg grinned and said, “Now, keep your shirt on, Mason. Take it easy. My business is not with your clients, but with you.”
“With me?”
“That’s right,” Tragg said, casually seating himself in a chair, tilting his hat on the back of his head and grinning amiably. “You’ve left us with something of a problem, Mason.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there’s a lot of newspaper pressure demanding that we go ahead and arrest Nadine Palmer but we haven’t a case against her. You bamboozled the jury into turning your clients loose on the ground of reasonable doubt. In other words, you created a reasonable doubt in their minds that Nadine Palmer had done the job. But you can’t prove it, and we can’t prove it. That leaves us behind the eight ball.”
“The district attorney,” Mason said, “got into this thing without consulting me, and he can get out of it without my help.”
“Quite right, quite right,” Tragg said. “I thought you’d feel that way but, on the other hand, I just had an idea that you might want to cooperate with the police department; that is, not the department as a whole, but with Lieutenant Arthur Tragg as an individual.”
Mason grinned. “Now that,” he said, “puts it on something of a different basis.”
Tragg said, “I’ll buy your reasoning that we got a little bit off on those wet shirt sleeves. Come to think of it, a man as fastidious about his personal appearance as Loring Carson would certainly have taken off his coat and rolled up his right shirt sleeve before he reached into the swimming pool to pull that ring and open the doorway to the concealed receptacle.
“Then I’ll go a little further with your reasoning. He still had his coat off but he had rolled his sleeves down. He had completed his business with the secret receptacle. He went back into the house and was just about to put on his coat when he saw something that caused him to go running out into the patio, and at that time there was something that arrested his attention in the swimming pool. That, in all probability, was just what you thought it was: a nude woman swimming back under the fence with a plastic bag containing the securities which had been lifted from the receptacle.
“Loring Carson bent down and grabbed her. He may have tried to hold her head under water, but he certainly grabbed her by the shoulders. He was struggling for the bag.
“She eluded him and swam back under the barbed-wire fence.
“Carson couldn’t get over that fence, he couldn’t get around it, and the only way he could have got underneath it would have been to have jumped into the swimming pool fully clothed.
“This solution didn’t appeal to him but he had keys to both sides of the house so he ran out around the barbed-wire fence and into the other side of the house. The girl had her clothes in that side of the house and Carson thought that if he stood guard over the clothes the girl would be forced to put in an appearance. So he stood there and got a knife in his back from the other side of the fence.
“Now then, I want some co-operation.”
“What co-operation?” Mason asked.
“I don’t want to be the fall guy in this thing,” Tragg said. “Your clients have been acquitted. They can never be prosecuted again. I don’t want them to confess if they’re guilty, but if they are guilty I would like to have you tell me that I’d be wasting my time trying to pin the crime on somebody else. That will be a confidential communication which will never be broadcast, never be released to the press. It’s simply a statement for my personal satisfaction.”
“For your personal information,” Mason said, “I would suggest that you continue your investigations, Lieutenant. I have every reason to believe that my clients are innocent. I’d stake my reputation on it.”
“Well now, that’s something,” Tragg said, his keen eyes sizing up Vivian Carson and Morley Eden. “Perhaps they’d tell me what actually did happen, just for my own guidance.”
Mason shook his head. “They’re not going to tell anyone their story,” he said.
“Do you know it?” Tragg asked.
“I know it,” Mason said, “and it isn’t going to be told.”
Tragg sighed.
Mason said, “There are a couple of fairly legible latents on that briefcase. Why don’t you run them down?”
Tragg shook his head. “Of all the damn-fool things any attorney ever did,” he said, “that business of making the jurors believe they were experts on fingerprints— Why, do you know I found out what went on in the jury room. Every one of those twelve people hypnotized themselves into believing that two of the smudged latent fingerprints on that hinged tile were the fingerprints of Nadine Palmer, and that her fingerprint was on the briefcase. Of course, there were certain points of similarity. I think you can find about four or five. We don’t consider we have a good identification unless we have eleven points of similarity, but there was no way of getting that before the jury — not the way you handled the case — and when those jurors found four points of similarity they immediately became fingerprint experts... That was the damnedest thing anybody ever did.”
“Well,” Mason said, “the prosecutor brought it on himself. He told the jurors that there was nothing to this business of fingerprint comparison, that they could see for themselves, that they could take the exhibits into the jury room.”
Tragg grinned. “For your private, confidential information, Perry, Morrison Ormsby is not the most popular deputy in the district attorney’s office right at this moment. In fact, there is a certain amount of hostility developing toward him. I wouldn’t doubt if he finds it advisable to go into private practice soon.