“Why, there’s only one person it could have been,” she said. “So that’s how he knew that the man I was talking with was a detective! Mr. Mason, do you mean to say that Mr. Caddo would have hired you, and then have warned me?”
Mason said dryly, “I not only don’t mean to say anything about Mr. Caddo, I’m not saying anything about Mr. Caddo.”
The dark eyes showed startled understanding.
“So,” Mason said, turning to Drake, “I guess there’s no reason why Miss Marlow can’t have your operative working for her. His name, by the way, is Kenneth Barstow, not Irvin B. Green.”
“Oh, I like that name,” Marilyn Marlow said.
“I thought perhaps you would,” Mason said, smiling at Drake.
She scribbled a telephone number on a card, pushed it across the desk to Mason. “You’ll call me in the morning?”
“In the morning,” Mason said, “I’ll let you know.”
Chapter 8
Mason, entering his office shortly after ten o’clock the next morning, found Della Street waiting in the private office, her finger to her lips.
“Hi, Della. What’s up?” Mason said, keeping his voice low in response to her signal.
“There’s someone in the outer office you don’t want to see.”
“Man or woman?” Mason asked cheerfully.
“Woman.”
“What’s the pitch?”
“Mrs. Robert Caddo.”
Mason threw back his head and laughed. “Why don’t I want to see her, Della?”
“She’s on the warpath.”
“What about?”
“She wouldn’t tell me.”
“This Caddo family is becoming a nuisance.”
“I told her you might not be in all day, that you saw people only by appointment, and that you wouldn’t see anyone unless I was able to give you a general idea of the nature of the business.”
“So what?”
“So she plunked herself down in a chair, clamped her lips together and said, ‘I’ll see him if it takes all week.’ ”
“How long’s she been there?”
“Over an hour. She was waiting in the corridor when Gertie opened the office and as soon as I came in, I went out and talked with her.”
Mason laughed good-naturedly. “What sort of a woman is she, Della?”
“She’s younger than he is, not bad looking. But right now she’s not exuding any charm and she isn’t bothering with sex appeal. All she needs is a rolling pin to be perfectly typical.”
Mason elevated one hip on the corner of his big desk, lit a cigarette and regarded Della Street with amused eyes. “What the devil do you suppose she wants here?”
“I suppose Caddo is trying to use you as an alibi.”
“Exactly,” Mason said, “and the alibi will be for his association with Marilyn Marlow. Hang it, Della, I’m going to talk with her!”
“I warn you. She’s on the warpath.”
“Irate women are all part of the day’s work in a law office. Let’s have a look at her, Della.”
“Well, get over in your chair,” Della said. “Rumple up your hair, pull some law books around. Look busy and dignified. You try to meet this woman informally and you’ll have me calling a doctor to pull pieces of rolling pin out of your head.”
Mason laughed, seated himself at the desk, opened some law books and held a fountain pen poised in his hand over a pad of paper. “How does this look, Della?”
She surveyed him with critical eyes and said, “It looks staged. There’s no writing on the paper.”
“Right you are,” Mason said, and immediately scrawled on the pad of yellow foolscap: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party."
Della Street walked around to place a hand on his shoulder and peer over at what he had written.
“How’s that?” he asked.
“That is perfectly swell. I’ll tell Mrs. Caddo that you’re very busy working on an important matter, but that you’ll give her five or ten minutes.”
“Shoot the works,” Mason told Della Street.
Della left Mason’s private office, returned after a few seconds with Mrs. Caddo in tow.
Mason heard Della Street say, “He’s absorbed in looking up a law point. Don’t interrupt him.”
Following that cue, Mason started to scribble meaningless words on the sheet of foolscap.
Mrs. Caddo pushed Della Street to one side and said in a high, shrill voice, “Well, I’ve got a problem for him to concentrate on. What does he mean by sending my husband out, chasing after some little hussy! If I had my way, a lawyer who does that would be made to pay damages. The idea of breaking up a home!”
Mason glanced up, said somewhat absent-mindedly, “Caddo... Caddo? You’re Mrs. Caddo? Where have I heard that name before, Della?”
“You know where you’ve heard it!” Mrs. Caddo screamed at him. “You advised my husband. You told him to go out and cultivate this hussy, and then he tells me, ‘My lawyer will know all about it! A business matter,’ he says. He didn’t think I’d ever find out who his lawyer was but I fooled him. I looked in his checkbook and there it was, big as day, a check stub showing Perry Mason had nicked the family bank roll for five hundred bucks. For what? For sending my husband out fawning around on a snaky-hipped brunette, that’s what for!”
Mason said, “Oh, yes, Robert Caddo, the publisher of the magazine. Sit down, Mrs. Caddo, and tell me what’s bothering you.”
“You know perfectly well what’s bothering me. A publisher! Robert Caddo is running a racket.”
“Indeed,” Mason said, raising his eyebrows.
“And I’ll tell you something else,” she went on, moving toward Mason belligerently. “Such as he is, he’s mine! I’ve got my brand on him and I don’t intend to let him get away. I’ve put up with enough to turn my hair white. I’ve got too much of an investment in him to let him go. Do you understand?”
“Perfectly,” Mason said.
“If I had it to do all over again, I wouldn’t marry him for a million dollars, but he had a good line and after he’d talked me into it, I kept tagging along, thinking we’d work it out all right some way.”
“How long have you been married?”
“Seven years. And it doesn’t seem long at all when you look back on it — not over a hundred and fifty or two hundred.”
Mason threw back his head and laughed.
“Go ahead and laugh,” she said savagely. “I suppose it strikes you as funny. I wasn’t bad looking in those days and Robert had a little money. I wasn’t in love with him but I didn’t think he was going to turn out to be a complete heel. So we tied up for better or worse, and I really and truly tried to make a go of it.
“I’ve put up with a lot since then. A couple of times I thought I’d pull out. But I stuck, and gradually, bit by bit, Bob has been getting a little property together. Now he’s getting to the age when he strays off the reservation now and then, and I don’t like it.”
Mason said, “You’re young yet, Mrs. Caddo. You certainly are far from being unattractive. If you think your life has been ruined...”
“I didn’t say my life had been ruined. I’m not one of these women to come wailing around that they’ve given a man the best years of their lives. Bob Caddo never had the best years of my life, although he may think he had. But what gets my nanny goat is to have him go traipsing around after this brunette and pulling the line that he’s merely following his lawyer’s advice.”
“That would bother me too,” Mason said. “Suppose you sit down and tell me about it.”