“Well, congratulations,” Drake said. “You sure do get around!”
“Can the wise stuff,” Mason snapped. “Get hold of some operatives and send them up here... First, I want a woman, if you can find one, to make the original contact. Try and have her in the corridor when this girl leaves the room. You’ll have to work fast, Paul. The woman can put the finger on this girl and identify her so that the men who are on the outside can pick her up when she leaves. I want her tailed and I want to find out where she goes.”
“Have a heart, Perry,” Drake begged. “It’s three o’clock in the morning. Good Lord, I can’t pull people out of a hat. It’ll take me an hour or two to get anybody on the job. I’ll have to get someone out of bed, get him dressed, give him time to get down there...”
“Who’s at your office?” Mason asked.
“Just a skeleton crew. I keep a night switchboard operator, a night manager, and there’s usually one man available...”
“The switchboard operator,” Mason interrupted, “man or woman?”
“Woman.”
“Competent?”
“Very.”
“Get her,” Mason said. “Shut off the switchboard for an hour. It’s a slack time in the morning so you won’t miss any business. Get that woman up here. Do it now. You only have a few minutes, so get busy. Close up your office for an hour if you have to, but be prepared to shadow this girl the minute she leaves the hotel.”
Mason didn’t wait to hear Drake’s expostulations. He slammed up the receiver and went back to the chair where he had been sitting.
Taking a white handkerchief from his pocket, he used a corner to wipe off the stain of lipstick from the back of his right hand. Then, moving the table to an inverted position, he used another corner of the handkerchief to wipe off a small sample of the lipstick from the bottom of the table.
Restoring the table to its original position, he took the gold-plated lipstick container from his pocket and very carefully touched the end of the lipstick to still another portion of the handkerchief. With his fountain pen he made marks on the handkerchief opposite each of the stains — 1, 2 and 5. Then he folded the handkerchief, put it back in his pocket and settled back once more in the chair to wait.
It was a long wait.
At first, Mason, watching the minute hand on his wrist watch, counting the minutes, kept hoping that time would elapse before the young woman returned so that Drake’s operatives could get on the job. Then after fifteen minutes he frowned impatiently, and began to pace the floor. There was, of course, the possibility that he was being stood up, being put in a position of complete inactivity at a critical period by a deliberate ruse.
He had been certain that it was Morris Alburg who had called him. He was at the place Alburg had designated as a rendezvous. There was nothing to do except await further developments — or go home.
Abruptly and without warning the doorknob turned. The door opened with careless haste, and the brunette girl appeared on the threshold. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes shining with excitement. It was apparent that she had been hurrying as fast as she could.
At the sight of Mason she abruptly relaxed. “Oh, thank heavens you’re still here! I was so terribly afraid you wouldn’t have had enough confidence in me to wait.”
Mason raised his eyebrows.
“I didn’t intend to be so long. I was afraid you’d walk out on me.”
“I wasn’t going to wait much longer at that. What was the idea?”
“I had to see Morris. That was all there was to it. I simply had to see him. I knew that.”
“And you’ve seen him?” Mason asked.
“Yes. I have a note for you.”
She thrust her hand down the front of her blouse, pulled out a note, crossed the room rapidly and pushed it into Mason’s hands. “Here, read this.”
The note was typewritten.
Mr. Mason:
Dixie tells me that you came to the room in the hotel all right, but won’t talk with her and are waiting for me to give you an okay.
I gave you an okay over the telephone. I told you I had sent you a letter with a check in it for a retainer, and that I wanted you to represent me and to represent Dixie. It’s a bad mess. Dixie will tell you all about it.
I want you to consider Dixie, the bearer of this note, just the same as you consider me. She is your client. I have turned to you for help because I need help. I need it bad and I need it right now. I was hoping I could wait in that room until you arrived, but I simply had to go out on this angle of the case that I’m working on. I don’t dare to tell you what it is because I don’t want to put you in an embarrassing position.
Now please go ahead and help us out of this mess. You’ll be paid and well paid.
Yours,
The body of the note had been typewritten, the signature was a scrawl in pencil. It could have been Morris Alburg’s signature. Mason tried to recall whether he had ever seen Alburg’s signature and couldn’t remember any specific instance.
The young woman radiated assurance. “Now we can talk,” she said.
Mason said nothing.
“Well — can’t we?”
“I want to know why Morris Alburg isn’t here,” Mason said. “He promised to meet me here.”
“But he had to change his plans.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s busy doing something that’s terribly important.”
“What?”
“Protecting me — and also himself.”
She drew up a chair, sat down, said, “Mr. Mason, when can one person kill another person — and be justified?”
“In self-defense,” Mason said.
“Does a person have to wait until the other one is shooting at him?”
“He has to wait until he is attacked, or until a reasonable man under similar circumstances would think that he was in great bodily danger or threatened with death.”
“And then he could shoot?”
Mason nodded. “That’s generally the law of self-defense. There are a lot of various qualifications about the man’s duty to retreat and about who provoked the conflict in the first place. But that’s the general rule.”
“Now, then,” she said, “suppose you knew that a cold-blooded, deliberate, efficient killer was on your trail and was going to commit murder. Wouldn’t you have the right to kill him first?”
“Under the circumstances I’ve mentioned,” Mason said.
“I know,” she said, “but suppose you knew a man was out to kill you. Suppose he was watching your place, sitting in a car, a machine gun in his lap, and you managed to sneak out of your back door without his knowing it. Couldn’t you take a rifle and blow the top of his head off without being guilty of murder?”
Mason shook his head.
“Why not?”
“Because under those circumstances,” Mason said, “you’d have had a chance to call up the police and ask for protection.”
She laughed scornfully. “Trying to get police protection from a man like the one I’m talking about is like asking the police to protect you against smallpox or the bubonic plague... Why, the man would simply slip through the fingers of the police like nothing at all and you’d be dead before morning.”
“You asked me to tell you what the law was. I’ve told you. I don’t make the law, I study it.”
She said, “That’s exactly the same thing Morris told me, but I wouldn’t believe him. It doesn’t sound fair to me, but that’s what he said the law was, and so he said that you wouldn’t approve of what he’s doing.”