“No,” Frink said, shortly and emphatically.
Mason said, “I think you’re a pretty good fortuneteller, Miss…”
“Carmen,” she said, “call me Carmen.”
“You’re good.”
“I have always been psychic. I can see things. And sometimes in the lines of the hand …”
“Do you really believe that?” Mason asked.
She shrugged and laughed. “How do I know what I believe? When one believes something it is a part of one. I only know that when I take the hand of a person I feel something come to me. It flows from that hand into mine, then into my blood and into my brain, and ideas come. I look at the lines on the hand and I hold the hand, but the things form in my brain. That is what you call psychic-no?”
“I suppose so,” Mason said dubiously. “Were you born here?”
She shook her head. “I was born in Mexico.”
“You are wise,” Mason said. “You have traveled—no?”
She laughed and said, “Already you have acquired the Mexican custom of ending a sentence with a question. My aunt laughs at me about that habit but she has it herself. We will make a question and say ‘no’ on the end when perhaps the answer, of course, is ‘yes,’ but we say ‘no’ as a question to make it easy for the person who answers.”
“Where were you educated?” Mason asked.
“I have traveled,” she said, somewhat wistfully.
“Europe?”
“No.”
“South America?”
She nodded.
Mason said, “I have always wanted to go to South America. Tell me, is it beautiful?”
Carmen rolled her eyes. “Oh, Senor, it is beeeeeautiful.”
“It is long since you have been there?”
“I have but just returned.”
“Indeed.”
“This thing which enables me to tell fortunes, works for others, but in my own case I cannot see things so clear. My one great friend, she disappeared and no one knows where she has gone. Some say she must be dead. But they cannot say when she died or how she died. For myself I can only admit I do not know.
“Sometimes I feel she is alive and very close, but sometimes I feel she is dead and very close. It is a puzzle. She had trouble with her mind before she died, and when a friend whom she trusted betrayed her confidence it was a great shock.
“But we talk about me too much. It is better to talk about you. You have many talents, you have things for which others may well envy you, but you are in great danger—no?”
“No,” Mason said, smiling.
“Oh, but I think you are. I think even now there are … But you perhaps do not wish to have your fortune told—no?”
Mason threw back his head and laughed. “Your salesmanship is charming. Certainly I wish my fortune told.”
She took his hand, held it for a moment.
Suddenly Frink coughed wamingly, caught Mason’s eye and gestured.
Mason looked up to see two men, broad-shouldered, wary in their bearing, yet aggressively important, enter the restaurant.
The Mexican woman who ran the place came to them cordially, then, as she saw the unmistakable stamp of official importance on their faces, the smile froze on her Hps.
One of the men said something in a low voice.
The woman pointed toward the booth.
The two men walked over, one of them pulled back his coat, showed his star. “All right, Carmen,” he said, “that’s enough. Get your things on. You’re coming with us. Someone wants to ask you questions.”
He looked impersonally at Mason, said, “Sorry to interrupt your party, Mister,” and put his hand on Carmen’s shoulder.
“Let’s get going, Carmen,” he said.
“But I do not understand…”
“Never mind, come on.”
The woman who ran the place was solicitous. “Please, Carmen, queek,” she said, and then broke into a rattle of Spanish, which galvanized Carmen into action.
“Well,” Mason said as the men escorted Carmen to a car, “it was good while it lasted. Ill call Paul Drake and see if he knows about this angle.”
He went to the phone booth, dialed Drake’s number, and when he had the detective on the line said, “They just picked Carmen up, Paul. Know anything about it?”
‘I don’t know, Perry, but I think the authorities have that letter in the bottle and they’re intending to launch an investigation. However, I have some other news. Did Carmen tell your fortune?”
“Yes.”
“How was it?”
“She’s good, Paul—a natural psychic.”
“Was it a good fortune?”
“What there was of it. She was interrupted.”
“If it was good,” Drake said, “she’s a rotten psychic. The word has just been passed that the sheriff has a dead-opeu-and-shut case against Dorothy Fenner and that he’s prepared to prove you were the accomplice who waited for her in the canoe when she tried to steal evidence from George Alder’s house Saturday night”
Chapter 14
“THE PEREMPTORY CHALLENGE IS WITH THE DEFENDANT,” Judge Garey said.
Perry Mason, on his feet, bowed urbanely. “We are thoroughly satisfied with this jury, Your Honor.”
Judge Garey glanced at the prosecutor.
Claud Gloster, district attorney, made a gesture, a sweeping inclusive gesture of approval. “Swear the jury.”
Judge Garey said, “The clerk will swear the jury.”
The jury of seven men and five women arose, held up their right hands and were sworn to try the issues well and faithfully in the case of the People of the State of California on the one hand and Dorothy Fenner on the other.
Claud Gloster, as prosecutor, made a very brief opening statement in which he stated merely that he expected to prove the defendant, Dorothy Fenner, with malice aforethought, had murdered George S. Alder at his house at the beach on a place known as Alder Island that death had been caused by gunshot that the bullet had penetrated the neck, severed a main artery, and shattered the spine. The victim had dropped in his tracks.
The victim had been expecting the defendant to call on him. He had locked up the dog which had been his in. separable companion for the past few months so that the defendant could come to the house without fear of the dog. The defendant had killed him with one shot from a .38 caliber revolver, fled out of the back door to the beach where she had left a canoe or some small boat, had rowed out to her own yacht, tied the boat to the yacht, changed her clothes, gone to the landing pier, and returned to her apartment.
It was a very sketchy opening speech. At the end of it, the prosecutor sat down. Mason waived his opening speech at that time and the district attorney called his first witness.
The autopsy surgeon testified with a bristling of technical language to the fact of death and the cause of death.
Claud Gloster, a careful, logical, dangerous courtroom antagonist, was careful to ask just the right questions to bring out the points he wanted and then stop.
“Do you,” he asked, turning to Mason courteously, “wish to cross-examine the witness, Mr. Mason?”
“Just a question,” Mason said.
“Go right ahead.”
“Thank you. Doctor, when you examined the body, you determined the cause of death?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You have mentioned that the wound was caused by a .38 caliber bullet?” ·
“Yes, sir.”
“That bullet was recovered then?”
“No, sir, the bullet was not recovered.”
“How, then, do you know the caliber?”
“From the size of the wound in part, in part by deduction from the fact that the gun which fired the fatal bullet was lying under the body.”
“If you didn’t find the fatal bullet, how do you know this gun which was found under the body was the weapon which fired the fatal bullet?”