Mason grinned.
“All right,” Fallon said, “let’s be frank. Those diaries turn up. Good Lord, we had no idea they existed at all. Evidently they were found in some box or something that no one knew anything about. The current diary, of course, was...”
“Yes?” Mason asked.
Fallon coughed. “I shouldn’t have used that expression. It was unfortunate.”
“What happened to the current diary?” Mason asked.
Fallon met Mason’s eyes. His own eyes were cold, hard, and hostile. “There was none,” he said. “She evidently stopped keeping a diary with the last volume that you now have in your possession.”
“How much is Addicks willing to pay?” Mason asked.
“I don’t know,” Fallon said. “He told me to go up to a thousand dollars. We had no idea on earth but what we could probably get them as a matter of courtesy by merely reimbursing you for the cost you had incurred, or, if you had an idea of making a profit, that two or three hundred dollars would represent all that we needed to pay. It is a measure of the impression that you have made on me that when I saw you weren’t being fooled by my sentiment act, I went right away to the extreme limit that I was authorized to offer.”
“All right,” Mason said, “so what do you do now?”
Fallon pushed the hundred dollar bills back into his pigskin billfold, carefully folded the five dollar bill, put that in his pocket, smiled at Mason and said, “I go back for further instructions. Thank you. Good morning!”
He turned abruptly on his heel and marched out of the office.
Mason glanced at Della Street in an unspoken question.
“Well,” Della Street said, “I presume that means the end of all office work for today.”
“It means the end of all office work for the day. I’ll take one of the volumes, you take one, give one to Jackson, give one to Gertie. We read through those diaries. We read every single word. Make notes of anything that’s significant and tie the notes in with the page references. Let’s find out what’s bothering Mr. Benjamin Addicks, preferably before we hear from Mr. Addicks again. What’s the last entry in the last volume, Della?”
“I’ve already checked on that, Chief,” she said, “It’s about two weeks before the date of her disappearance.”
“Gosh, how I wish we had volume number five,” Mason said, “but from the inadvertent slip made by Three-Dollar-Bill Fallon, I am certain that Addicks, Fallon, and Company found that diary, put it in a sack, tied a weight on it and dropped it overboard in the deepest part of the channel. All right, Della, let’s find out what we have. Cancel all appointments for today, throw that mail off the desk, and let’s go to work.”
Chapter number 3
Late Tuesday afternoon, after all of the rest of the office force had gone home, Perry Mason and Della Street sat in Mason’s private office correlating information that had been received from Helen Cadmus’ diary.
“Hang it,” Mason said, “I’m not excluding the possibility of murder.”
Della Street said, “Well, I’m almost at the point of excluding the possibility of accident and suicide.”
“We haven’t any evidence,” Mason told her, “that is, nothing tangible.”
“It’s tangible enough to suit me,” Della Street said with feeling. “You read through that diary, Chief, and you get the picture of a darned nice, normal, young girl with a beautiful body, who has ambitions to get into the movies — which I suppose nearly all girls with beautiful bodies have — and a keenly sympathetic, understanding mentality.
“She was fascinated by the force of Benjamin Addicks’ character. She resented his treatment of the gorillas and monkeys. She felt that there was some great mystery in connection with his life. The first volume shows a fierce curiosity to find out what that secret is, and then all of a sudden there’s no further reference to it.
“Now here’s something else, the girl was in love.”
“How do you know, Della?”
“Her attitude, the way she wrote in her diary. She had leisure time and she spent it thinking romantic thoughts.”
“But she didn’t confide those romantic thoughts to her diary,” Mason pointed out.
“Not in so many words,” Della Street agreed, “but it’s all there in between the lines. For some reason she avoided really confiding to her diary, but she unmistakably disclosed her moods. People who are in love talk about the beautiful things of nature, beauty in the spring of the year and in the spring of the heart.”
“Della, you’re getting poetic!”
“I’m being logical.”
“Do you keep a diary yourself?”
Her face flushed furiously. “And, another thing,” she went on quickly, “she hated Nathan Fallon.”
“Who doesn’t?” Mason asked.
“Nathan Fallon.”
Mason threw back his head and laughed.
Della smiled and said, “She loved animals and she was strongly attached to this one monkey named Pete. She resented the experiments Benjamin Addicks was conducting with animals.”
Mason’s eyes narrowed. “Addicks was experimenting along modem lines, trying to make animals neurotic. And he had some peculiar ideas about hypnotism. Apparently he felt that a man could not be put into such a deep hypnotic trance that he would do something that would outrage his higher moral sense, but he felt that gorillas were so closely related to man that they could be hypnotized, and taught to commit a homicide.
“I’m damned if I know what point Addicks was trying to prove. I have a feeling there’s something in his past. He may have been in serious trouble, may have committed a crime and felt that he did it under the hypnotic influence of some person.”
“It’s a nightmarish background for a secretarial job,” Della Street said. “Addicks is wealthy, but that doesn’t give him any excuse to torture animals.”
Mason nodded. “Apparently Helen Cadmus felt the same way at first. Then she seems to have changed. She certainly referred to Addicks with great respect and seemed to feel there was something important back of his experiments.”
“And then she was murdered,” Della Street said.
“Don’t say that, Della. There’s no proof.”
“Well, I have an intuitive feeling, a very definite feeling she didn’t commit suicide.”
Mason said, “There’s another interesting angle in the volume of the diary that I read. It interests me very much, Della.”
“What?”
“This monkey, Pete, that she was so fond of, developed a habit of making off with her little knickknacks, anything that he saw her admiring. Her compact, her lipstick, her earrings — he’d take them and hide them. Apparently his favorite hiding place was a Grecian urn in the reception hall— Della, I have a hunch. Who’s the attorney representing Mrs. Josephine Kempton in that suit against Addicks?”
“I’ll look it up,” Della Street said. “It’s in the outer office.”
She was gone for about three minutes. When she came back she handed a typed slip of paper to Mason on which had been written, “James Etna, of the firm of Etna, Etna and Douglas.”
As Mason consulted the memo, she said, “I’m afraid I led with my chin, Chief.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I went out in the outer office the board was clattering away at a great rate, so I plugged in to explain that it was after office hours, that there was no one here to answer the phone, and... well, I found myself talking with Mortimer Hershey, the business manager of Benjamin Addicks. He wanted very much to arrange a conference between you and Mr. Addicks.”
“What did you tell him?” Mason asked.
“I told him that I would have to get in touch with you and consult your appointment book. Then he explained to me that Mr. Addick’s couldn’t come to your office because he’d been injured.”