Mason said, “The law gives a man the right to have counsel and...”
“Save it,” Tragg said. “Someday a luncheon club may want you to make a speech and I’d hate to have you use up all your material.”
“I’m just rehearsing.”
“You don’t need rehearsal. You do all right when you ad lib. In fact sometimes you’re too good... What about the fur coat?”
“What fur coat?”
“The one Della wore out of the restaurant last night.”
Mason turned to Della Street with mock sternness. “Della, have you been shoplifting again?”
She nodded, contritely. “I can’t help it, Chief. It’s that awful impulse. Everything goes black, and when I come to, there I am standing on a corner in a fur coat with the price mark still on it, and I know that my amnesia has been playing tricks on me again.”
Tragg clucked and sadly shook his head. “Poor kid,” he said to Mason, “It’s something she really can’t control. It’s an occupational disease. It comes from working for you.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Della Street said quickly. “It’s hereditary. It came from my paternal grandfather’s side of the family — old Captain Street, the pirate. He used to take what he wanted whenever he could find a cutlass handy.”
“Why don’t you try going to a psychoanalyst?” Tragg asked.
“I did. He told me that my conscience was at war with my inherited impulses. And so whenever I wanted to take anything I blacked out so I wouldn’t know what I was doing. It was what he called a defense mechanism.”
“Offer any cure?” Tragg asked.
“He wanted me to lie on a couch and tell him about my early life.”
“It didn’t help?” Tragg asked.
“Not a bit.”
“Well,” Tragg said, “I’m going to give you a treatment of my own that may cure you, Della.”
“What is it?”
“I’m going to give you twenty minutes to get that fur coat in my possession.”
“Which fur coat?” Mason asked.
“The fur coat she wore out of Alburg’s restaurant last night.”
“Well, now, let’s see,” Mason said. “Was that the Hudson Bay rabbit, or the clipped beaver cat, Della?”
Lieutenant Tragg interrupted. “It was the ‘mink stole.’ ”
“A mink stole?” Mason asked, genuinely puzzled.
“Perhaps that is the wrong use of grammar,” Tragg said. “I should have said the ‘mink stolen.’ ”
Della Street glanced at Perry Mason.
“Stolen from whom?” Mason asked.
“That I can’t tell you, yet.”
“Come again when you can.”
“No, I want the coat, Mason.”
Mason lit a cigarette and settled back in his chair.
“You could get in bad over this thing,” Tragg told him.
Mason asked politely, “How was the elevator service coming up, Tragg?”
“Lousy.”
“It frequently is this time of night. The fellows who can clear up their desks early leave their secretaries to handle the last-minute rush of stuff, and start streaming out of the building and getting in their cars so they can beat the traffic rush going home.”
Tragg nodded.
“So that sometimes you have to wait awhile for an elevator. And yet, Tragg, people do put up with that inconvenience. They come all the way downtown and pay for a parking lot for their car. Then they put up with all the inconvenience of the elevators and come up here to see me just to ask me to protect their rights. You know, after a person has gone to all that trouble, I feel that I really should give him at least a run for his money.”
“Anybody ask you to protect her rights on the fur coat?”
“If I answered that question,” Mason said, “you’d probably ask me another.”
“I’d ask you two more.”
“I thought so.”
Tragg said, “So I’m going to tell you something.”
“Go right ahead.”
“Ever hear of Robert Claremont?”
Mason shook his head.
“Don’t remember reading about him?”
Again Mason made a gesture of negation.
“Bob Claremont,” Lieutenant Tragg said, almost musingly. “A pretty darned nice kid. I worked on that case. A fine, clean-cut, upstanding young chap who had always wanted to be on the force. That was his ideal. The war came along and put a crimp on his ambition for a while, and then he was discharged and used the schooling he had coming to study up a lot of stuff about police science so he’d be a better cop... Can you imagine that, Mason, a fellow going to school day after day, studying. So many people think of cops as being beetle-browed gorillas who go around smacking citizens on the head with night sticks, collecting payoff from the bookies...”
“And then retiring to ranches down in Texas,” Mason interrupted.
For a moment Tragg frowned. Then he said, with repressed anger in his voice, “That’s the hell of it, Mason. That’s what gives the decent cop a hard row to hoe, a few rotten apples in the barrel. Citizens don’t remember the story of the cop who gave his life trying to stop a hold-up. All they can remember is the cop who has the bad memory and can’t recall for the life of him the name of the bank in which he deposited the last hundred thousand dollars.”
“I was only kidding,” Mason said.
“I’m not kidding,” Tragg told him. “You have any idea what it means to be a cop, Mason? You’re off duty. You go to a market or a service station or a liquor store. The door opens. Three men stand there with sawed-off shotguns. It’s a stick-up.
“If you were a citizen you’d reach for the ceiling. Your friends would make a hero out of you because you didn’t faint. But you’re a cop. You reach for the ceiling and the hoodlums would frisk you and take your gun and badge. The angry citizens would swamp the department with letters of protest.
“So you go for your gun. You haven’t a chance in a million. You’re off duty. You’re at a disadvantage, but you have the tradition of the force on your shoulders. You take your one chance in a million. You go for your gun. You brace yourself against the bite of the slugs in your guts so you can squeeze the trigger a couple of times before you cash in.
“Then citizens make wisecracks about oil wells in Texas.”
“Okay,” Mason said. “There are cops and cops. You’re on the square, Tragg. I didn’t mean you when I talked about the millionaires. You told me to save my line for a luncheon-club speech when I tried to talk about the lawyers. I’ve let you talk about the cops. Now tell me about Claremont.”
“Bob became a rookie. He went ahead rapidly. Everybody liked him. He was alert, on the job every minute of the time, and if anyone had told him there was corruption anywhere on the force, he’d have smeared the guy. The force was his ideal. It represented the law, standing guard over the helpless.”
“What happened to him?” Mason said.
“No one knows exactly. Apparently he saw something about an automobile that made him suspicious. He must have stopped the car to question the driver. Why he would have done it, no one knows. He wasn’t on traffic, and he wouldn’t have stopped a car for a routine shakedown. There was definitely something about the car that aroused his suspicions.”
“Go ahead,” Mason said.
“There must have been at least two men in the car, and perhaps more,” Tragg said, “because they undoubtedly surprised him and forced him to get into the car with them.”
“Why would they do that?” Mason asked.
Tragg shook his head.
“Go ahead,” Mason invited.
“As nearly as we can put things together,” Tragg said, “he was forced into the car. They made him lie down on the floor. They took his gun away from him, and then they drove about ten miles out of town. And then while he was still lying down on the floor of the car, they pushed the gun against his head — a contact wound. Ever see a contact wound, Mason?”