“But she didn’t tell them specifically that she had wiped the prints off the receiver or that you had intimated she should?”
Mason shook his head. “Not specifically. It’s a plain inference from what she did tell them.”
“Where is she now?”
Mason grinned, and said, “Right now she’s out on habeas corpus. She’s not a fugitive from justice and she’s where the police are going to have one hell of a time finding her. Darned if I know why I do it, Della! But I always do.”
“Do what?”
“Stick my neck out for my clients. I should have taken the case just the way any other lawyer would have; taken the facts as they were and let the chips fall wherever they might. But no, I’m not built that way. I’m always a pushover for a client who is having the breaks go against her.”
“After all,” Della Street said, “we’re not too certain that Marilyn Marlow is as innocent as she sounds.”
“I can’t picture her as being guilty,” Mason said.
“Not of murder, perhaps, but I do think she’s holding out on us somewhere along the line. I’m not satisfied with any explanation that has been made so far of why that ad was put in the lonely-hearts magazine. I still don’t think we know what she wanted with Kenneth Barstow.”
Mason sat down at the desk, lit a cigarette, sighed wearily, then said to Della Street, “I told Paul Drake to be waiting for me. I gave him a few chores to do. Get hold of him on the telephone, will you, Della? We’ll get him in and then let him go to bed.”
“Are you going to get some sleep?”
“Darned if I know. I’m in what is sometimes referred to as ‘an unenviable position.’ I should have known Marilyn Marlow would have cracked the minute they started putting the pressure on her. She isn’t built right to withstand a lot of rough stuff.”
Della Street said, “We have her word for what happened prior to the time we arrived there at Rose Keeling’s flat — her word and that’s all!”
Mason nodded and said, “Get Drake on the line.”
Della Street put through the call, and a moment later had the detective on the line.
“This is Della, Paul. The Chief’s here now. Want to come down?... Okay, I’ll have the door open for you.”
Della Street hung up the telephone, crossed over and opened the door. A moment later they heard the sound of Drake’s steps in the corridor and then the tall detective droop-shouldered his way through the door and flopped in limp fatigue into the big easy chair.
Della Street closed the door.
Drake spun around so that he adopted his favorite position of sitting crossways in the chair.
“What do you know, Paul?”
“A lot of stuff,” Drake said. “I’ve checked Ralph Endicott’s alibi. You wanted me to. Police were checking it right along at the same time, so it was a cinch. It’s absolutely okay, completely watertight.”
“No question?”
“None whatever. Aside from ten or fifteen minutes between the time he left the dentist’s office and the time he got to the bank, every second of his time’s accounted for. And he didn’t leave the chess games until three hours after the murder had been committed.”
Perry Mason started pacing the floor of the office, his coat unbuttoned, his thumbs pushed in the armholes of his vest, his head thrust forward in thought.
Abruptly he said, “I telephoned you about this other witness, Ethel Furlong. Did you get in touch with her?”
Drake nodded.
“What about her?”
The detective thumbed through the pages of a notebook, said, “The police had her, giving her a shakedown. They let her go. My man interviewed her. The police were interested in finding out about the will and about what had happened. She tells a straightforward story. No one had ever offered her any money, either one way or the other. She was a witness to the will. Eleanore Marlow, Marilyn’s mother, called two nurses from the floor, Ethel Furlong and Rose Keeling. She told them that Mr. Endicott wanted to execute a will and wanted them to be witnesses. She says that Rose Keeling was called out on an emergency call at about the time the will was being read to Mr. Endicott, but that she returned before the will was signed and that when Endicott signed it, both of the nurses as well as Eleanore Marlow were in the room with him; and that he had to sign with his left hand, but that he seemed to be perfectly aware of what was going on; and he specifically stated to them that this was his will and he had signed it and that he wanted them to sign as witnesses."
“Ethel Furlong is positive about that?”
“Positive.”
“Had Rose Keeling approached her with any proposition?”
“Nothing.”
Mason resumed pacing the floor.
“Of course,” he said after a few moments, “Marilyn Marlow called a turn when she said that she had to hold two witnesses in line in order to get anywhere. But the other side only needed to have one of the witnesses lined up to win their case.
“When you come right down to it, it makes you a little hot under the collar to think of these brothers and sisters, who never gave a damn for George Endicott in his lifetime, sitting out there in his house and plotting and planning to beat Marilyn Marlow out of her inheritance. Apparently someone had made a payoff to Rose Keeling, and I don’t think it was Marilyn Marlow. But Endicott says it was and the police are going to be pretty apt to take his word for it.”
Drake said, “It could be, of course, that both Ethel Furlong and Rose Keeling received a thousand bucks to make their testimony come out right, and Ethel Furlong is staying put. Rose Keeling was having an attack of jitters.”
Mason said, “It’s possible, but I don’t warm up to the idea. What about Caddo, Paul? What did you find out about him?”
“He and his wife had a battle and she threw an inkwell, I guess. He sent a suit out to the cleaners that was all spotted with ink. You knew, didn’t you, that the police found a playsuit with the blouse ripped open and ink spattered over it?”
“No. Where?”
“In the soiled clothes hamper of Rose Keeling’s flat.”
Mason was excited now. “Was it Rose Keeling’s sunsuit?”
“Apparently it was.”
“Any police theories on that?”
“None. They think she had been filling a fountain pen, and...”
Mason gestured Paul Drake to silence, resumed pacing the floor, then abruptly he turned to face the detective.
“Rose Keeling must have been murdered when she was leaving the bathroom.”
“Yes. Apparently she was hit over the head with some blunt instrument, probably a blackjack,” Drake said. “She wasn’t stabbed until after she’d hit the floor.”
Mason stopped his pacing abruptly. “How’s that?”
“Someone sapped her before she was stabbed.”
“That’s interesting!”
“Why would they do that, Chief?” Della Street asked.
Mason said, “Probably someone hiding behind the door, waiting for her to come out of the bathroom. The minute she did, this person hit her on the head. He did that because he had to be certain she wouldn’t make any noise and he wasn’t certain he could make a clean-cut stab that would kill her instantly. What about the time of death, Paul?”
“Right around twelve o’clock.”
Mason said, “The way I figure it, Della Street telephoned at just about the time the murder was being committed. The murderer was lying in wait for Rose Keeling to come out of the bathroom. The phone started ringing. That didn’t suit the murderer at all. He was afraid Rose might wrap a towel around her and rush out to answer the telephone. He knew that if that happened, she’d be on the run and he wouldn’t stand any chance to sneak up behind her and club her.”