“Well,” Mason said, putting the notebook and fountain pen in his pocket, “if that’s the way you feel, Mrs. Kempton, I’m not going to try to urge you. I would only suggest that you regain your composure as soon as possible. I want you to tell us what happened so that we can make a statement to the police and to the press. I think the police are entitled to a statement at the earliest possible moment, and, of course, it’s always a bad thing when you adopt the position with the press that you won’t make any statement at all.”
“They haven’t let me see the press yet — or, rather, they haven’t let the press see me.”
“They probably will,” Mason said affably, stretching and yawning. “However, you can tell them that as soon as we’ve had a joint conference with James Etna, we’ll release a statement of some sort to the press.”
“Thank you.”
They were silent for a few seconds.
Abruptly the door opened, and the officer said to Mason, “Come on back. Lieutenant Tragg wants to see you.”
Mason said, “I haven’t been here more than three minutes. I was to have a ten or fifteen minute conference.”
“That’s all right. The Lieutenant wants to see you.”
The officer who had been guarding Mrs. Kempton, and who was standing in the corridor, entered the room and sat down.
Mason made a reassuring gesture to Mrs. Kempton, followed the other officer back to the room where Lieutenant Tragg was waiting.
“You take anything out of that house?” Lieutenant Tragg asked.
“What house?”
“That Addicks house, Stonehenge.”
Mason shook his head.
“Well,” Tragg said, “we’ve got to make sure. It’s just a formality. You don’t have any objections, do you?”
“Certainly I have objections.”
Tragg said, “Don’t be difficult, Mason. You know as well as I do that if you make objections to being searched we’ll simply book you as a material witness, and when we book you we’ll take all your things away from you and put them in an envelope, and put you in a nice quiet cell and...”
“Okay,” Mason said. “Go ahead.”
Tragg ran his fingers quickly over Mason’s clothes and said, “Take everything out of your pockets and put them in a pile on the table, Mason.”
Mason said, “Ordinarily I’d tell you to go to hell, Lieutenant, but because I’ve got a lot of work to do tonight, and want to get this over with, I’ll be agreeable.”
“That’s fine,” Tragg said.
“And,” Mason went on, “because I have nothing to hide.”
Mason took the notebook from his pocket.
Tragg grabbed it.
Mason tried to retrieve it, but it was too late.
Tragg grinned and said, “This is what I wanted, Mason.”
“You have no right reading my personal notes,” Mason said.
Tragg riffled through the notebook, came to the page on which Mason had written his instructions to Mrs. Kempton, tore that page out of the book, said, “Hell, I knew you wouldn’t walk into anything like that, but this will establish my point with the guy who thought it was a swell idea.”
Mason said, “You have no right to take that page out of my notebook.”
“I know, I know,” Tragg said. “Go into court and get an order and we’ll give it back. Why are you so afraid to let your client talk?”
“Because I don’t know what she’s going to say.”
“All right,” Tragg said. “Now I’m going to tell you something, Mason, something for your own good.”
“What?” Mason asked.
“There’s some evidence against Mrs. Kempton. She’s going to be kept here all night and perhaps tomorrow.”
“On what charge?”
Tragg grinned.
“You put a charge against her,” Mason said, “or I’ll slam a writ of habeas corpus on you.”
Tragg said, “Go ahead, and slam the writ of habeas corpus on us, Mason, then we may charge her and we may turn her loose. Until you get a writ she’s going to be right with us. And I’m going to warn you not to get tied up with her too much and too deep until you know what her story is. Actually, Mason, she and Benjamin Addicks were the only two people in that house. One of those persons was stabbed to death. Now where does that leave your client?”
Mason said, “If you’d give me a chance to hear her story I’d...”
“I gave you your chance,” Tragg said. “You wouldn’t let her talk.”
“Sure,” Mason told him. “With a microphone right back of that table and seventeen detectives sitting there listening at the other end of the wire.”
“Well, what did you expect?” Tragg asked.
“Just that,” Mason said.
“Then you weren’t disappointed. I have some other news for you. Your car’s ready. Della Street’s waiting there for you. Go on back to your office. If you want, get out a writ of habeas corpus. You may have trouble finding a judge at night and it’ll be tomorrow morning before you can get a writ and have it served. Give me a ring tomorrow morning and I may save you the trouble.”
“And in the meantime?” Mason asked.
“In the meantime Mrs. Kempton stays with us.”
Chapter number 10
Mason walked over to the place where his car was parked in the police garage. Della Street, who was sitting in the driver’s seat, waved her hand at him, and started the motor.
Mason moved over to the right-hand side of the car, opened the door and slid in beside her.
Della Street eased the car into motion, driving out of the police garage and into traffic on the cross street with all of the sure competency of the skilled driver.
She kept her attention on the traffic while she said to Perry Mason over her shoulder, “Did they try any funny stuff?”
“All they could think of,” Mason said. “What did they do with you?”
She said, “I talked. I told them my story and they knew it was right because they checked up on the time of the telephone call, and the place. They went over the car looking for fingerprints and trying to find bloodstains. Then they let me go. But I knew they were going to try something with you and Mrs. Kempton. Did she talk?”
“No. She sat tight. They put us together in a room that was all bugged up.”
Della merely nodded, jockeyed the car into position at a stop light, and held herself in readiness to beat the line of traffic to the crossing.
Mason studied her with an affectionate smile. “It isn’t going to hurt anything if one of those cars gets ahead of us, Della.”
“It’ll hurt my feelings,” she said. “That fellow in the gray sedan has been trying to push me over and hog the traffic for the last block.”
She shifted her position slightly, her skirt up over her knees so as to give her freedom of leg action, her left foot on the brake, her right on the throttle.
The signal changed.
Della Street’s reactions were instantaneous. The car leaped forward and shot across the intersection. The gray sedan tried to keep up, failed, and, sullenly dropped behind.
“Where to?” Della Street asked. “The office?”
Mason said, “The nearest telephone, and then we eat. There’s a drugstore with two phone booths around the corner here.”
Della Street whipped the car around the corner.
Mason shook his head sadly. “And you object to my driving.”
“It seems different when I’m doing it,” she admitted sheepishly.
“It is different,” Mason told her.