Tragg said, “It could be done. That bus will do around a hundred miles an hour.”
“The bus will,” Mason said, “but the roads won’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t care how fast you drive. You can pick the very fastest roads in the country, and by the time you have driven eleven hours, you will find you can’t have covered more than six hundred odd miles. Of course, you could pick a straight, fast, desert road and drive back and forth on it and average more. But a person wouldn’t do that. In three or four hundred straight-road miles, you are going to encounter grades, curves, detours, cities, bottlenecks, boulevard stops. Seven hundred and thirty-two miles means that the car was driven about four hundred miles away from the city, then turned around and driven back toward the city. The accident happened about sixty miles from Los Angeles.”
Tragg said, “That is interesting.”
Mason said, “Paul and I have been thinking about the man who was driving the car...”
“Conceding for the sake of the argument that your client is telling the truth,” Tragg interrupted.
“Naturally,” Mason said. “I take that for granted whenever I start in on a case.”
“I can’t take anything for granted.”
“Well, conceding it for the sake of the argument,” Mason said, “that this man either came from or went through Bakersfield around ten o’clock. He was wearing a dinner jacket. When a man puts on a tuxedo, he is usually attending something which doesn’t begin before seven-thirty or eight at the very earliest. It is rather unusual for him to leave such an affair at quarter to ten. Now then, if this man didn’t come from Bakersfield, we can probably stretch that time at least another hour. He must have left at quarter to nine or perhaps eight-thirty.”
“Left what?”
“Whatever he was attending, dinner, dance, or whatever it was.”
“It might have been a lodge.”
“It might have been.”
“But Greeley was in San Francisco the night of the accident.”
“I am coming to that,” Mason said. “Greeley was in San Francisco at quarter past five. He hadn’t taken a tuxedo to San Francisco with him, just a double-breasted gray business suit. At ten o’clock that night he was in Bakersfield wearing a tuxedo. Now stop a minute and figure what that means.”
“What does it mean?”
“He couldn’t have driven from San Francisco to Bakersfield in approximately four hours and forty-five minutes.”
“Go ahead. You are doing fine.”
“If he had been wearing a gray business suit at the time,” Mason said, “he would hardly have taken a plane, kept a rendezvous with someone, picked up the car, changed to a tuxedo, and still been at Bakersfield at ten o’clock.”
“All right. We will pass that for the moment. He might have done it, but let us hear the rest of it.”
“That brings us to the question of whether he was wearing the tuxedo at five o’clock. And, since he hadn’t taken a tuxedo with him, it must, in that case, have been some other person’s, one that Greeley had rented, or one he kept in San Francisco. But why would he have been in the Southern Pacific Depot at five-fifteen in the evening wearing a tuxedo? That is pretty early in the day for a dinner jacket.”
“Keep right on,” Tragg said.
“The tuxedo must have been twenty-four hours old,” Mason announced. “In other words, he must have put it on for some function he was attending the night before, something from which he had been called away very suddenly and hadn’t had an opportunity to change his clothes.
“If Greeley didn’t have a chance to put on a tuxedo after he left San Francisco, he must have had it on before.”
Tragg frowned thoughtfully. “Don’t say anything for a minute. Let me think that over.”
He shifted his position in the chair so that he was sitting forward on the extreme edge of the seat. He spread his knees far apart, put his elbows on his knees, raised his hands to his chin, and sat staring down at the carpet.
Abruptly, he straightened. “Mason, you should have been a detective. You are right.”
“Of course,” Mason said, “it is hard to back-track a man under ordinary circumstances, but a man who wears a tuxedo in daylight is very conspicuous.”
Tragg said, “Give me some paper, Mason.” He whipped a pencil from his pocket, braced the pad of paper which Mason gave him over his knee and started making swift notes. “We will look up Spinney in San Francisco. Now then, we will start checking with service stations to see if a man in a tuxedo bought gasoline for an automobile. We will check those stations all the way down the valley route, and we will check the air lines, and see if a man in a tuxedo didn’t get aboard a plane out of San Francisco sometime on Wednesday night.”
“And while you are about it, try late Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning,” Mason said.
Tragg looked up from his writing. “I don’t get that.”
Mason said, “It is just an angle. Let us try it. You know he may have been wearing his tuxedo all Tuesday night and all day Wednesday, because his double-breasted gray suit may have been in Homan’s house.”
“What makes you think that?”
“When he left home, he was wearing a gray suit. On the Ridge Route, he was wearing a tuxedo. When he got home, Mrs. Greeley says he wasn’t wearing a tuxedo. Yet he didn’t take any baggage with him when he slipped out of Homan’s car up on the Ridge Route.”
“Well, I can’t give you much on it, but it’s an angle. Okay, let me phone headquarters.”
“You can use Della Street’s office,” Mason said.
Tragg said, “I am going to get some immediate action on this.”
“You can’t start the wheels grinding any too fast to suit us.”
Mason and Drake sat smoking while they listened to Tragg putting through the telephone calls in Della Street’s office, instructing headquarters to make a check-up, sending out inquiries to the state highway police, and asking the San Francisco police to check on what had happened at the airport.
“How about going out and grabbing a bite to eat?” Tragg asked, returning from Della’s office.
Mason said, “We are waiting for Della Street. She went out to Hollywood to get a line on Homan.”
“Can’t you leave a note for her?”
“I could,” Mason said, “but I am watching. I thought perhaps there would be a call from her.”
Tragg said, “It will take me an hour or so before I begin to get reports from my end, and I thought it would be a good time to eat. We may be busy afterwards.”
“You folks go out, and I will wait,” Mason suggested.
Tragg said, “Oh, I shall just run down to a counter and pick up a hamburger sandwich. I...”
The phone on Mason’s desk rang.
Mason picked up the telephone, said, “Hello,” and heard a feminine voice say, with every indication of relief, “Oh, I am so glad I caught you at your office, Mr. Mason. I must see you at once.”
“Who is this?”
“Mrs. Greeley.”
“What is it?” Mason asked. “No, wait a minute. Hold the phone just a moment, please.” He cupped his hand over the receiver, said to Tragg, “Mrs. Greeley on the phone. She is getting ready to tell me something, sounds rather excited. You should better listen in on the extension — just in case.”
“Where?” Tragg asked.
“Go in Della Street office and push that left-hand button...”