“Could be,” Mason said.
“What the hell’s wrong?” Drake asked.
“This message,” Mason said, “is supposed to have been written surreptitiously on the underside of the table by some woman who was playing around with her lipstick, and managing, whenever the attention of her captors was distracted, to write something on the bottom of the table. Is that the idea?”
“Well, that certainly is the way it looks to me,” Drake said.
Mason took a notebook from his pocket, put it on his knee and said, “Now, this represents the top of a table. Take a pencil and write the word ‘help’ on there.”
“Okay,” Drake said, “what does that prove?”
“Now then,” Mason said, “turn the notebook upside down. Pretend that’s the bottom of the table. Now you’re sitting at the table. Here, if it’ll help you any, hold this notebook against the bottom side of the table. Now, take the pencil and write the word ‘help’ on the bottom side of the table.”
“All right,” Drake said sarcastically, “anything to accommodate. But it seems to me a hell of a way to waste time.”
He seated himself in the chair. Perry Mason held the notebook firmly against the bottom of the table. Drake wrote the word “help.”
Mason brought the notebook back to the top of the table.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Drake said. And then suddenly said, “Let’s do that again, Perry.”
Mason held the notebook against the bottom of the table, and again Drake wrote the word “help.” Again he turned the notebook face up on the table and shook his head dubiously. “It’s a new one on me,” he said. “Of course, it’s logical enough, when you come to think of it. It just never occurred to me, that’s all.”
“Every time you write something on the undersurface of a table, you have to write it that way,” Mason said. “Hold this notebook up in front of a mirror now and it spells ‘help’ perfectly, but when you look at it like this it’s a good example of what is known among kids as ‘looking-glass writing.’ ”
“Therefore,” Drake said, “you feel that this message was not written by someone who was seated at the table.”
“That message,” Mason said positively, “was written by someone who had no need whatever to hide what she was doing. She simply turned the table upside down and wrote the word ‘help’ and then that string of figures.”
Drake nodded.
“The message,” Mason said, “could be a trap.”
“In what way?”
Mason ignored the question and continued to think out loud. “We feel certain that the message is a fake because it couldn’t have been written in the manner in which it’s supposed to have been written. Therefore there must be some reason why that message was written.”
Drake watched him silently.
Mason held up two fingers. “First,” he said, touching his thumb to the index finger, “the message is a trap. Second, the message is a blind.”
“What do you mean, a blind?”
Mason said impatiently, “We know that Morris Alburg was in this room. At least he said he was.”
“It was his voice all right?”
Mason nodded. “I recognized his voice. The man was terribly excited. He was in this room, or at least that’s where he said he was, and there was no reason why he should lie.”
“Then what happened to him?”
“Then,” Mason said, “someone held a gun on him, and Morris left a message. Perhaps there was a girl with him and she left a message in lipstick.”
“But I thought you just said she couldn’t have done that, that it would be...”
Mason motioned him to silence. “The parties who took Morris Alburg out of this room discovered that a message had been left. Perhaps they didn’t have time to find the real message so they left an obvious blind alley for me... Now let’s take another look at that table, Paul.”
Together the two men studied the bottom of the table.
“It doesn’t look to me as though there had been any-other message here,” Drake said.
“Apparently not. Let’s look around. Perhaps the message was in some other place and they couldn’t find it, and wanted to fix it so I couldn’t. The people who took Alburg out of the room must have been in a hurry.”
“Aren’t you getting rather farfetched with this thing?” Drake asked.
Mason said impatiently, “There’s a reason for everything. There’s a message on the bottom of that table. There’s a reason for it. I want to find out what the reason is.”
“But why should somebody leave one message in order to destroy another if he didn’t know about the other message?”
“They must have had a suspicion there was another message, but didn’t know where it was. So they decided they’d leave a message that would be a blind... Start looking around, Paul. Let’s see what we can find.”
Mason opened the closet door, looked on the inside of the doorjamb, looked on the space at the back of the door which was disclosed when the door swung outward on the hinges.
He searched the inside of the closet, the inside of the bathroom.
“Finding anything?” Drake asked.
Mason came to the bathroom door and shook his head.
Drake, who had been making a rather desultory search, said, “Suppose we explore the idea that it’s a trap, Perry. What would it be?”
Mason said, “It could be a trap laid for us. It could be something to make us waste a lot of valuable time. Since I’m convinced the whole thing is phony I don’t want to waste time on it.”
“But it means something, Perry.”
“Sure it does,” Mason said, “probably a book. Take the words ‘262 V 3.’ That probably means page two-sixty-two of volume three.”
“That’s it,” Drake exclaimed, “and then ‘L 15 left’ would mean line fifteen in the left-hand column.”
“Obviously,” Mason said, “it’s a book in a series of three volumes, then, that are divided into columns. What would that mean, Paul?”
Drake frowned thoughtfully. “Could it be a set of law books, Perry?”
Mason said, “More apt to be the volumes you’re looking at right now.”
“I don’t get it... Oh, you mean the telephone directory. But they don’t come in marked volumes.”
“These do. See that paper pasted on the back?”
Paul Drake picked up one of the books and turned it over. “Keymont Hotel Telephone Directory No. 1, Room 721,” he read. “Obviously the type of joint where the tenants steal anything that isn’t nailed down... Gosh, Perry, let’s look!”
Drake grabbed volume three of the telephone directory, turned the pages, counted down the lines, then read off, “Herbert Sidney Granton, 1024 Colinda Avenue.”
“Mean anything?” Mason asked.
“Hell, yes,” Drake said excitedly. “It’s a name I’ve heard. It — Wait a minute, Perry.”
He whipped out a notebook, thumbed the pages, said, “Sure. It’s one of the aliases of George Fayette who was arrested for bookmaking, and whose case seems simply to have evaporated into thin air... Gosh, Perry, let’s go and...”
Mason shook his head.
“You mean we don’t follow up this lead?” Drake demanded.
“Not yet,” Mason said, “we finish looking.”
Mason looked on the undersides of the chairs, crawled under the bed, and said, “Paul, that’s a movable mirror over the washstand. Take a look on the back of it, will you?”
Mason was still under the bed when Drake called out excitedly, “Something here, Perry.”