“Well, get on,” Mason demanded irritably. “Tell me the worst of it!”
“I wanted you to get the sketch before I told you the one point that changes it from a theory to a fact.”
“Well, what is it?”
“Police found the empty satchel under the bed. The satchel which the bank teller identifies as the one that held the twenty-five thousand dollars. Of course, when the police first found it last night, they didn’t know that it had any particular significance, but they were grabbing fingerprints off of everything, and so they dusted the handle of that satchel. They found three latent prints on it. Two of them were prints of Harrington Faulkner’s right hand. The third one was the right middle finger of Sally Madison’s hand. That’s the story, Perry. That’s the story in a nutshell. I have a tip that the district attorney is going to give you a chance to let Sally Madison plead guilty to second-degree murder or perhaps manslaughter. He recognizes the fact that Faulkner had been a first-class heel and that there’d been a lot of provocation for the crime. Furthermore, now that he knows Faulkner was the one who took Tom Gridley’s gun from the pet shop, he knows that Sally must have seen the gun lying on the bed and acted on the spur of the moment. So there you are, Perry. There’s the thing in a nutshell. I’m no lawyer, but if you can cop a plea for manslaughter, you’d better jump at it.”
Mason said, “If Sally’s fingerprint was on that satchel, we’re licked — that is, if the satchel was under the bed.”
“Are you going to try and get a plea?” Drake asked anxiously.
“I don’t think so,” Mason said.
“Why not, Perry? It’s the best thing you can do for your client.”
Mason said, “It puts me in something of a spot, Paul. The minute she pleads guilty to manslaughter, or to second-degree murder, Della Street and I are hooked. We then automatically become accessories after the fact, and it doesn’t make a great deal of difference whether we’re accessories after the fact to manslaughter or to second-degree murder. We can’t afford to take the rap.”
“I hadn’t thought of that!” Drake exclaimed in consternation.
“On the other hand,” Mason told him, “I can’t let my personal feelings influence my duty to my client. If I think a jury might stick her with a verdict of first-degree murder, I’ll have to make a compromise if it looks as though I can serve her interests better by a compromise.”
“She isn’t worth it, Perry,” Drake said earnestly. “She’s two-timed you all the way along the line. I wouldn’t consider her interests for a minute.”
Mason said, “You can’t blame a client for lying, any more than you can blame a cat for catching canaries. When a person of a certain temperament finds himself or herself in a jam, the natural tendency is to try and lie out of it. The trouble with Sally Madison was she thought she could get away with it. If she had, I probably wouldn’t have condemned her too much.”
“What are you going to do, Perry?”
Mason said, “We’ll get all the facts we can, which probably won’t be many, because the police have all the witnesses sewed up tight. We’ll walk into court on the preliminary examination and turn everything wrongside out. We’ll look around and see if we can’t get a break.”
“And if you can’t?” Drake asked.
Mason said grimly, “If we can’t, we’ll do the best we can for our client.”
“You mean you’ll let her plead guilty to manslaughter?”
Mason nodded.
Drake said, “I hadn’t realized before where that would leave you, Perry. Please don’t do it. Think of Della, if you won’t think of yourself...”
Mason said, “I’m thinking of Della. I’m thinking of her to beat hell, Paul, but Della and I are playing this thing together. We’ve played things together for a good many years. We’ve taken the sweet, and we’ll take the bitter. She wouldn’t want me to throw over a client, and by God I’m not going to.”
16
There were only a few scattered spectators in the courtroom as Judge Summerville ascended the bench, seated himself, and the bailiff called the court to order.
Sally Madison, somewhat subdued, but with her face still giving no clue to her thoughts, sat directly behind Perry Mason, apparently completely detached from the tense, dramatic conflict of the trial itself. Unlike most clients, she didn’t bother to whisper comments to her lawyer, and might as well have been a piece of beautiful furniture so far as taking any active part in her defense was concerned.
Judge Summerville said, “Time and place heretofore fixed for the preliminary hearing of The People versus Sally Madison. Are you ready, gentlemen?”
“Ready for the prosecution,” Ray Medford said.
“Ready for the defense,” Mason announced calmly.
The district attorney’s office was quite apparently trying to sneak up on Mason’s blind side.
So far, Tragg had said nothing about those incriminating fingerprints of Della Street’s on the murder weapon. Ray Medford, one of the shrewdest men on the prosecutor’s staff of trial deputies, was taking no chances with Perry Mason. He knew too much about the lawyer’s ingenuity to overlook a single bet. But, on the other hand, he was very careful to treat the case merely as a routine procedure, one where the judge would bind the defendant over to answer, and the main contest would be made before a jury in the Superior Court.
“Mrs. Jane Faulkner will be my first witness,” Medford said.
Mrs. Faulkner, clothed in black, took the witness stand, related in a low voice how she had returned from “visiting friends” and had found Perry Mason and Sally Madison, the defendant, waiting in front of the house. She had admitted them to the house, explained to them that her husband wasn’t home, then gone to the bathroom and found her husband’s body on the floor.
“Your husband was dead?” Medford asked.
“Yes.”
“You are sure that the body was that of Harrington Faulkner, your husband?”
“Quite certain.”
“I think that’s all,” Medford said, and then added with a disarming aside to Perry Mason, “Just to prove the corpus delicti, Counselor.”
Mason bowed. “You had been with friends, Mrs. Faulkner?”
She met his eyes calmly, steadily. “Yes, I had been with my friend, Adele Fairbanks, during the entire evening.”
“At her apartment?”
“No. We had been to a movie.”
“Adele Fairbanks was the friend to whom you telephoned after you had discovered your husband had been murdered?”
“Yes. I felt that I couldn’t stay in the house alone. I wanted her to be with me.”
“Thank you,” Mason said. “That is all.”
John Nelson was next called to the stand. He gave his occupation as a banker, stated that he had known Harrington Faulkner in his lifetime; that on the afternoon of the day on which Faulkner was murdered he had been at the bank when Mr. Faulkner had telephoned, stating that he desired rather a large sum of money in cash; that shortly after the telephone call had been received, Faulkner had shown up, had been admitted to the bank through the side door, and had asked for twenty-five thousand dollars in cash, which he had withdrawn from his checking account. It was, he explained, his individual account, not the account of Faulkner and Carson, Incorporated. The withdrawal had left Mr. Faulkner with less than five thousand dollars to his credit in his personal account.
Nelson had decided it would be a good plan to take the numbers of the bills, inasmuch as Faulkner had asked for twenty thousand dollars in one-thousand dollar bills, for two thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills, and for three thousand dollars in fifty-dollar bills. Nelson testified that he had called one of the assistant tellers, and, together, they had managed to list all of the numbers on the bills while they kept Mr. Faulkner waiting. Then the money had been turned over to Mr. Faulkner and he had placed it in a satchel.