“I’m telling the truth, Mr. Mason.”
“Then,” Mason told her, “that’s all there is to it.”
“And I’m to talk to Lieutenant Tragg?”
“Sing like a skylark,” Mason told her. “Bare your soul to him. Pose for pictures in the newspapers. Tell everybody everything. Have nothing to conceal. Only be sure that it’s the truth, because if you try to lie, you’ll get caught, and if they catch you in a lie it’ll mean life imprisonment, perhaps the death penalty.”
“What I told you is the truth, Mr. Mason.”
“Okay. At eight o’clock tomorrow morning start broadcasting.”
“And you think you can make Fleetwood talk before tomorrow morning?”
Mason said, “I’m going to be a busy little boy, and when I get done I’m going to put so much heat on Bob Fleetwood that the varnish will begin to crack.”
“I think you’re very, very nice, Mr. Mason,” she said.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Mason said, grinning. “Incidentally, while it’s all right for you to tell them about Patricia clipping the corner of the hedge, and about finding Fleetwood lying there unconscious, be careful to emphasize the fact that Patricia didn’t think she had hit anyone.”
“But doesn’t that make it worse? In other words, shouldn’t Pat have known it?”
“Sure, she should have known it. You don’t think for a minute she hit him, do you?”
“Why, Mr. Mason... I... She must have!”
“Phooey!” Mason said. “Your husband planted his car in such a position that Patricia would have to cut the corner of the hedge. Your husband was the one who discovered Fleetwood lying there.”
Her eyes were wide with the sudden realization of what must have happened. “You mean then, that it was all a plant that...”
“Sure it was a plant,” Mason said. “Your husband cracked Fleetwood on the head. He thought he’d killed him. He had a corpse to dispose of with a nice little head injury. The best way he could dispose of it was by letting Patricia think she’d hit him with her automobile, and letting her take the rap.”
Mrs. Allred pressed her knuckles against her lips.
“Think it over,” Mason said. “Don’t emphasize it. Let Lieutenant Tragg uncover it, then it’ll be his baby.”
And Mason walked out, leaving her sitting there.
14
“Drake in?” Mason asked the night janitor who brought up the elevator.
“Yeah. He came in fifteen or twenty minutes ago. You fellows must be working on something hot.”
Mason said, “Oh, we’re just keeping out of mischief.”
Drake kept switchboard operators on twenty-four hours a day, so Mason, opening the office door, jerked his thumb toward Drake’s inner office and at the same time raised his eyebrows in silent interrogation.
The girl at the switchboard, busy taking a call, nodded and pointed.
Mason unlatched the gate from the narrow, cramped waiting room, walked down the long corridor and into Drake’s office.
Drake was talking on the phone as Mason came in.
He motioned the lawyer to a seat, said into the telephone, “Okay, I got it. Now give me that address again.
“All right. No, stay on the job. Just keep an car to the ground and see what you can find out. Telephone anything that looks important.”
Drake hung up the phone and said, “Well, that’s a break. I don’t know how much of a break.”
“What is it?” Mason asked.
“That’s my man down there at headquarters in the pressroom.”
“What’s he found out?”
“The last reports say Fleetwood is still sticking to his amnesia story.”
Mason said, “That’s not a break. That’s something I want to talk with you about, Paul. What else?”
“He went through the motions of just having regained his memory, and called his girl friend.”
“Did your man get her number?”
“Her name, telephone number and address.”
“What’s her name?”
“Bernice Archer.”
“Her name hasn’t entered the case. What about her?”
“Oh, he just called her to tell her that he’d been suffering from a lapse of memory, that the police told him he’d been holed up at the ranch of a man named Overbrook, that he’d just regained his memory, and that under no circumstances was she to pay any attention to anything she might hear about him, until he had an opportunity to explain things to her.”
“What sort of a conversation was it?” Mason asked. “Was it difficult, do you know?”
“How do you mean?”
“Was the girl throwing a fit?”
“No. Apparently it was just a routine conversation. He called her, talked to her and then hung up.”
Mason frowned, then said, “That doesn’t seem right, Paul.”
“Why not?”
Mason said, “Suppose you’re a guy’s girl friend. Every one of your friends knows that he’s going with you. Now all of a sudden, the fellow takes a run-out powder. Apparently he’s run away with a married woman. You don’t hear anything from him. Then out of a clear sky, he rings up and says, ‘Listen, sweetheart, don’t believe anything you hear about me. I’ve had a lapse of memory. I’ll be up to see you as soon as I can.’ Well, that just isn’t right.”
“You mean the girl friend would throw hysterics?”
“She’d probably raise hell. There would be tears and recriminations, and then she would wind up with the question, ‘Well, do you love me? Well, tell me you love me. Well, tell me this other woman was nothing in your life.’ You know, all that sort of stuff.”
“Could be, all right,” Drake said.
“Of course,” Mason went on, “I’m having troubles of my own, Paul, and I’m looking for loopholes everywhere.”
“What’s happening?”
Mason said, “My client tells me a story that’s probably okay. She swears it is. It’s a story that could stand up, if it had just the right props, but it’s a story that could fall down mighty easy.”
“Well?”
“Now this man, Fleetwood,” Mason said, “is in a spot. He pulled this amnesia business, and I managed to get him into the hands of the police before he’d had an opportunity to do too much thinking about it. Right now, he’s stuck with the murder of Bertrand Allred. He was the last man to see him alive, and he can’t deny that he killed him, because he doesn’t know anything at all that happened.
“Obviously, a man as shrewd as Fleetwood is not going to let himself be placed in that position without trying to do something about it. The only thing that he can do is to come out and admit that all this amnesia business was a stall, that he remembers everything.”
“The minute he does that, he’s put himself in a hell of a fix,” Drake said.
“I know that,” Mason said, “and that’s the thing that I’ve been counting on as a prop to help hold up Mrs. Allred’s story — but a great deal is going to depend on what he says when he starts telling the truth.”
Drake shook his head. “If he took Mrs. Allred’s car, then he was the last person to see her husband alive. If he gives a load of this amnesia business to the police, and through them to the newspaper boys, and finally weakens and says that he knew what was going on all the time, it doesn’t make such a hell of a lot of difference what his story is. I think his best move is to sit tight on the amnesia, regardless of how much it hurts.”
“It might be, at that,” Mason said, “and we don’t want him to do what’s good for him. We want him to do what’s good for my client. We’ll force his hand. I think that he’ll start telling the truth about the amnesia, and when he does he’ll tell a story that will have been carefully thought out.”