Mason turned right, and had only gone two blocks when he overtook the taxicab in which Della Street was riding.
Mason drew alongside and pressed the button of his horn.
Della looked up, first with apprehension, then with glad surprise. She tapped on the glass, signaling the driver to stop.
When the driver had brought his cab to a stop, Della Street paid him off and climbed in with Mason.
“How did you do?” Mason asked her.
“Swell, but my gosh, I had a wild ride up to the office!”
“The cop try to pump you?”
“No.”
“Not a word?”
“No.”
“Try to date you?”
“No.”
Mason said, “There’s something funny about that chap, but I don’t know what it is. Now let’s go to see what Ethel Furlong has to say.”
They found the number to be an apartment house on the west side of the street. Della Street ran her hand down the list of cards and said, “Here she is — apartment 926.”
She pressed the bell repeatedly.
There was no answer.
Mason frowned. “Just our luck not to have her home, Della. Press one of the other buttons. We’ll see if we can’t get someone to let us in.”
Della Street pressed two or three buttons at random, and, after a moment, someone buzzed the catch on the outer door.
Della Street and Mason entered the building and took the elevator to the ninth floor.
As they approached the door of 926, Della Street said, “There’s an envelope pinned to the door.”
“Probably a note saying when she’ll be back,” Mason said.
They walked rapidly down the corridor. Della Street, in the lead, said, “It’s an envelope addressed to you, Chief.”
Mason said incredulously, “It has my name on it?”
“That’s right.”
Della Street handed him the envelope, which had on the outside the words, “Mr. Perry Mason,” written in the even, regular strokes of a literate hand.
Mason pulled back the flap on the envelope. “Still damp,” he said. “It was sealed only a minute or two ago.”
He unfolded the note, read the message and then suddenly broke into laughter.
“What is it?” Della Street asked.
Mason said, “I’ll read it to you:
“Dear Mr. Mason:
“ ‘Thanks very much for the tip which enabled us to get Ethel Furlong’s story before you had a chance to foul it up for us. Tragg had called the office of the Probate Clerk and had her name and address. Thanks to your erudite conversation with the estimable Miss Street, I was able to anticipate your plans. You may be interested to know that I had high marks in forensic debate and was on the college debating team which won the 1929 conference championship. My physiognomy became badly marred because of a mistaken impression that I was possessed of the necessary pugilistic ability to carve a career for myself in that profession. Don’t worry about Ethel Furlong. She’s in nice safe hands, and by the time we get done with her, we’ll have her story all down in black and white, with her signature at the end of it. After that, it won’t do much good to have you try to change it. Best wishes.
Della Street said indignantly, “Why, the dirty...!”
Mason, grinning broadly, said, “It shows the danger of judging people by the way they look. He sat there and played dumb and let us tell him all of our plans.”
“Just where does that leave us?” Della Street asked.
“Temporarily,” Mason said, “it leaves us behind the eightball.”
“And what do we do now?”
“Return to the office,” Mason said, “and start Paul Drake doing a lot of leg work. And the next time we meet a ‘dumb’ cop, Della, we’ll forget the broken nose and cauliflower ear, and look him over to see if he has a Phi Beta Kappa key hanging from his watch chain. Let’s go.”
Chapter 12
The two Endicott brothers and the one sister had moved into the big mansion home which had been left them under the terms of George Endicott’s will.
Years ago the house had been one of the show places of the city. Now it was an anachronism, a big wooden-gabled structure with side porches, spacious grounds, shade trees, lawns, summer houses, terraces, winding walks and sunken pools. It seemed more a museum than a dwelling.
Mason turned his car in at the driveway, which, together with the big garage, had been constructed as a modern improvement. The hard-surfaced driveway cut through in a businesslike straight line past the winding walks which followed the contours of the terraced grounds.
The lawyer stopped his car under the protecting portico of what had once been a shelter over a carriage entrance. He climbed three stairs and rang a bell which jangled sharply in the dark bowels of the ancient house.
Mason rang a second time before he heard slow steps, and then the door was opened by a man whose bald head, fringed with white hair, whose sharp, piercing eyes, beak-like nose and thin lips gave him the appearance of a reincarnated predator.
“I would like to see any one of the Endicott family,” Mason said.
“I’m Ralph Endicott.”
Mason handed the man his card. “I’m Perry Mason, a lawyer.”
“I’ve heard of you. Won’t you come in?”
“Thank you.”
Mason followed Endicott in through a gloomy, paneled passageway redolent with the splendor of a bygone age.
His guide opened a door and said, “Won’t you step in here, please, Mr. Mason?”
This room was thoroughly in keeping with the rest of the house, a large, spacious library, in the center of which was a massive mahogany table on which were three huge table lamps. The shades, some four feet in diameter at the bottom, were composed of heavy leather, and the clustered lamps on the interior poured forth illumination upon the huge table and sprayed light out through the openings in the tops of the shades.
Three chairs had been drawn up at this table. Two of them were occupied, and the third, which evidently was where Ralph Endicott had been sitting before he went to answer the bell, was pulled slightly back from between the other two.
The two people who looked up at Mason’s entrance had a certain family resemblance.
Reflected light from the big reading lamps on the table splashed illumination on their faces and etched them into white brilliance against the somber background of booklined shelves.
“Mr. Mason,” Ralph Endicott said, “permit me to introduce you to my brother and sister. Mrs. Parsons, may I present Mr. Perry Mason, a lawyer. And this, Mr. Mason, is my brother, Palmer Endicott.”
“Good evening,” Mason said, giving his most cordial smile. “I’m very pleased to meet you.”
The others bowed coldly.
“Won’t you be seated, Mr. Mason?”
“Thank you,” Mason said.
Ralph Endicott drew up a chair from Mason directly across the table from where the others were sitting, then walked around to take his place once more in the third chair between the other two.
Mason had a chance to size up the brother and sister while Ralph was seating himself.
Palmer was a thin-faced, bushy-haired individual, somewhere in the seventies. He had about him a look of perpetual skepticism. Lorraine Endicott Parsons quite evidently lavished care upon herself, such care as could be given in home treatments. She sat haughtily erect in stiff-backed, uncompromising truculence. Her face had begun to sag, but her chin was up; her hair was frosty white, and there was the cold ruthlessness of self-righteous respectability in her posture. There was about all three of them an appearance of shabby gentility which added to the over-all family resemblance. Clothes were dark in color, old-fashioned in cut, and well worn.