“Go ahead,” Mason said.
“When she runs out the back door of the restaurant, running from Fayette, she sees the car come. It’s coming toward her. She looks at the car. She sees the number on the front license plate. Then there is a man with a gun. She runs and he shoots, but she remembers the license number.”
“Go ahead,” Mason said.
“She tells it to me. I am smart; I have connections. I look it up. It is a car registered to Herbert Granton. Dixie remembers Granton is a name Fayette uses sometimes when he is being respectable. All right, we have an ace in the hole. Maybe a smart lawyer can do us some good if he finds that automobile and it has a bullet hole.”
“Go ahead,” Mason said.
“So I get the detective to go first to the Keymont Hotel. Pie sizes the place up. Fie gets the room all wired. He says he will be where he can listen. Everything is fixed. I wait until after midnight, then I ring this girl. I tell her, ‘All right, Mildred, you come to the Keymont. Room 721.’”
“The girl had first told you about the Keymont Hotel?”
“That’s right.”
“Weren’t you suspicious about going there?”
“Sure, I’m suspicious, but what are you going to do? I told her, ‘Not the Keymont. Some place else.’ She said, ‘No, I am hot. Fayette will kill me. If he thinks I would give him a double-cross we would be rubbed out. I am at the Keymont and I don’t dare to go out. You get a room in the Keymont. You tell me where that room is. I will come to you. I will give you evidence.’ So I get this room 815. I get it for Dixie. I register her as Mrs. Madison Kerby and I pay in cash.”
“Now I begin to get the picture,” Mason said, “but why... Well, never mind. Tell me what happened.”
“So, I call you. I get you. I have the room wired. I make a date with the girl. We go to the room.”
“Did you have a gun?” Mason asked.
“Sure I had a gun. What the hell?”
“All right, go ahead.”
“I want you there all the time. If it is the police, you can be the smart lawyer. If it is a witness and she really has evidence, you can sew the thing up.”
“What happened?” Mason asked.
“I am worried. All the time I worry. The older I get the more I worry. I think about this; I think about that. Always I am worried. Too many taxes. Too many responsibilities. Too much labor trouble. Costs of running the business too high. Worry, worry, worry. All the time worry.”
“Go ahead.”
“So I am worried you get my call and go back to sleep. That would be the bad thing. After we are in the Keymont, I tell Dixie to call that number where we get you. Be sure Mr. Mason don’t go to sleep.”
“You gave Dixie the number?”
“Sure Dixie has the number. She was with me. I tell you she remembers numbers like a flash.”
“Go ahead.”
“So Dixie is at the telephone. She just gets the night clerk. She is ready to give the number when the door opens. Two men and a woman walk in and I know the minute I look I am licked. I reach for my gun. Dixie is smart. She says on the telephone, ‘Call the police.’ That’s to the clerk.”
“What happened?” Mason asked.
“Somebody clips Dixie. They put a hand over her mouth.”
“What about your gun?”
“My gun!” Alburg said, and laughed sarcastically. “My gun is on the bed. Two men have guns in their hands. A gun on the bed is no good against a gun in the hand.”
“Why didn’t you give the detective who was listening in the other room some sort of a signal?”
“Because they are too damn smart. They know that room is wired as well as I do. Every time I try to say something a man puts his finger to his lips and jabs the gun in my guts. Then I try to get smart and say something anyway, and a blackjack hits me on the side of the head. I am sick to my stomach with pain. My knees are hinges that don’t work. That’s the story.”
“That isn’t the story,” Mason said. “Go on. Tell me what happened.”
“What the hell? We go to a freight elevator. They take us down the freight elevator. There is a car in the alley. I am put in the back seat and then down on the floor. They hold their feet on me. That is the way the cop got killed. They put him in a car and hold their feet down and they blow his brains out.”
“Go ahead,” Mason said.
“We go to an apartment hotel. We go up a back elevator, but I am smart. I have to go to the bathroom. In the bathroom there is a towel. The name of the apartment hotel is on it.”
“Do you remember it?”
“Of course I remember it. It is the Bonsal. B-o-n-s-a-l. I am in apartment 609-B.”
“Then what?”
“Then, after a long while, I go down the back way again. They are taking me for a ride. We go up a side road out of the city. I am still down on the floor. A man takes out a gun and puts it at my head. I am ready to grab and just then the driver yells, ‘Look out!’ He throws on the brakes.”
“What had happened?”
“I don’t know what had happened. I know what did happen. I am on the floor. The man holding the gun on me is thrown forward against the back of the front seat. I grab the gun. The car comes to a stop. I have that door open so fast you think I am greased, like lightning. I hold the gun. I say, ‘Stick ’em up, you guys,’ and then I am in the brush like a deer.”
“It was brushy?”
“We stop on a steep hill in a park. There is thick brush and the car is right by the edge of the steep bank. I go like a deer, I tell you. How I run!”
“Then what?”
“Then I walk and walk and walk and walk. I get a bus. I wait for a while to make sure you are in your office. I want to call you on the phone, but I am not like Dixie. I don’t remember the number you gave me to call. So I sit in a little greasy spoon restaurant. I wait. Then I get a taxi. I go to your office and they grab me.”
Mason thought the situation over. “Did you talk to the police?”
“Sure I talked to the police. I take them to the very place where I jump from the car. I show them my tracks.”
“Did they see the tracks?”
“Sure they saw the tracks. They see where I am jumping down the hill like a deer, forty feet at a jump. They laugh. They tell me I can leave tracks anywhere.”
“So then what?”
“Then we go to the Bonsai Hotel Apartments.”
“And what happens?”
“I don’t know. The police go up to apartment 609-B. They don’t tell me. I think something is haywire. They act like they have me hooked.”
“And you told this story to the police, just as you are telling it to me now?”
“That’s right. That’s my story.”
“Did the police take down what you said in shorthand?”
“Yes.”
“Then,” Mason said, “it’s not only your story, but you’re stuck with it.”
Chapter 15
Mason was checking out of the jail when the man at the desk said, “There’s a telephone call for you, Mr. Mason. Do you want to take it?”
“Probably not,” Mason said.
“It’s from someone here in the jail.”
Mason said, “You have a couple of thousand people here. I suppose about fifteen hundred of them want to see me, hoping that I’ll find some way of getting them out. Can’t you get a name for that call?”
“It’s a woman,” the man said. “She’s over in the women’s ward. She says her name is Dayton.”
Mason frowned for a moment, then said, “Give me that phone.”
“Hello,” Mason said into the phone. “Who is it?”
“Dixie Dayton.”
“Which one?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve already talked with one young woman who said she was Dixie Dayton and who...”