“I am no longer hungry. I’ll leave it to you to exercise the masculine prerogative of picking up the check.
“Good night.” Her chin held high, she swept out of the booth.
Mason looked at the two one-hundred-dollar bills she had left on the table, looked ruefully at Della Street. “Is there a cat in your apartment building?” he asked. “A cat or a dog?”
“The people next door have a cat.”
“When the waitress brings Ellen Adair’s steak,” Mason said, “we’ll ask her to bring a Bowser bag. You can tell the cat that it’s an ill wind that blows no one good.”
Chapter Four
Promptly at nine o’clock the next morning Paul Drake’s code knock sounded on the door of Mason’s private office.
Della Street let Drake in.
Paul Drake, tall, loose-jointed, casual in appearance, jackknifed himself into the client’s overstuffed chair, interlaced the fingers of his hands over his right knee, grinned at Mason, and said, “Up to your neck again?”
“Up to my neck,” Mason said.
“Hang it,” Drake said, “if someone came in and asked you to draw up a chattel mortgage, you’d manage to make a first-class mystery out of it somewhere along the line and probably have a murder case out of it before you got done.”
“What’s happening now?” Mason asked.
“Well, of course,” Drake said, “I don’t want to inquire into your business, and there are certain things which very definitely are none of my affair, but you certainly have stirred up a mess.”
“How come?”
“This decoy you hired yesterday — the tall girl.”
“What about her?”
“She certainly proved a beautiful red herring and sent the pack baying off on a false scent.”
“How big a pack?” Mason asked.
“Well,” Drake said, “you got me interested in the case, Perry. I had to take a gander myself. The people who are on the job are pretty smooth workers, but they left a chink in their armor at that.”
“Go on,” Mason said.
“You may have noticed,” Drake said, “that rental automobiles have different colors on the rear-view mirrors.”
“Colored mirrors?” Mason asked.
“The backs of the mirrors,” Drake said. “The rear-view mirror is over the windshield. When you look at it from the driver’s position you see to the rear, but when you look at it from the front you see the metallic back of the minor Now the different rental companies color these mirrors in different colors so that anyone seeing the car approaching can tell that it’s a rental car and, by the color, tell what company rented it.”
Mason nodded. “I knew that, Paul. What about it?”
“Well,” Drake said, “Your decoy certainly did a job. She left the office and was tailed by your heavyset, baldish individual around forty-five. Then after she got to the street another man was waiting — this rather tall fellow with high cheekbones — a guy somewhere near sixty, thin and somber-looking.”
“Go on,” Mason said; “you interest me.”
“Well, my operative took a bus out to the apartment. Incidentally, Perry, here’s the address of the apartment and the telephone number.”
Drake handed across two cards. “One for you and one for Della,” he said. “Slip this card in your pocket, Perry; you may want to call the number. I think you’re going to have developments in the case.”
“Why?” Mason asked.
“It’s too hot,” Drake said. “It’s going to come to a boil.”
“Go on, Paul.”
“Well,” the detective resumed, “after my operative got to the apartment she telephoned me that everything was okeydokey, that she had gone to the apartment, that a car had tailed her, that she’d followed your instructions and slipped out the back door, gone to her own apartment, packed up what clothes she needed for a four- or five-day stay, gone to the supermarket, loaded up with provisions, and then gone back to the hideout apartment and holed up.
“She said she hadn’t been there over a couple of hours when two cars drove up. One driver was a man about forty-five, rather heavyset — in short, a man who answered to the description of your friend whom you felt was a detective. The other one was this tall, thin, somber-looking guy who, she said, looked like a reincarnated turkey buzzard. They parked their cars on opposite sides of the street, facing in opposite directions.
“Now that’s a trick that you use only when you’re really spending money on a shadowing job and can’t afford to lose the subject or can’t afford to lose anyone who comes to call on the subject. In other words, you have an automobile facing in each direction and either can take up a shadowing job without making a U-turn or doing anything that’s conspicuous.”
Mason nodded.
“Well,” Drake said, “I thought I’d go out and take a look at the situation just to check on it and pick up the license numbers on these cars.
“As soon as I drove past the first car I saw the color of the mirror and knew it was a car from a drive-yourself agency, so I went down the street a few blocks and turned around and came back and checked on the mirror of the other car. They were both from the same agency.
“So I went to the agency, used a little pull, and checked on any persons from the Midwest who had been renting automobiles.
“As you know, these drive-yourself agencies insist on knowing the person with whom they’re doing business and knowing that the person is a duly licensed driver. You have to show your automobile license in order to rent a car.”
“Go on,” Mason said.
Drake said, “Well, I got two names for you. Your heavyset man is Jarmen Dayton. He’s from Cloverville. And the tall, cadaverous individual is Stephen Lockley Garland, also of Cloverville.
“So,” Drake said, “I ran through my files and found that I have a real good contact in a city only twenty-five miles from Cloverville, so I gave my correspondent a ring and asked him if he knew a detective by the name of Jarmen Dayton. He did. Dayton follows a pattern. He was on the police force at Cloverville, worked up to be chief of police, got mixed up in a political hassle, got fired, opened up a private detective agency.
“So then we come to this man Garland — Stephen Lockley Garland. Now there’s a guy.”
“What about him?” Mason asked.
“The big thing in Cloverville is the Cloverville Spring and Suspension Company. It’s an old firm. It’s been in the same family for a generation or two and it owns the town. It’s big: you don’t get anywhere in Cloverville unless you kowtow to the Spring Company.”
“Go on,” Mason said.
“Well, this fellow Garland has been with the company for years. Ostensibly he’s a public-relations man. Actually he’s a troubleshooter, a fixer, and all the rest of it.
“If you’re running for office in Cloverville, you hunt up Garland and make him a lot of campaign promises about what you’ll do if you’re elected. If you don’t do that, you don’t get elected.
“If something happens and someone does something the Spring Company doesn’t approve of. Garland pussy-foots around to the city trustees, and the first thing you know there’s an ordinance covering the situation. They have a nickname for him: they call him Slick Garland.”
Mason grinned. “Looks like we’ve got the big guns trained on us, Paul.”
“One other thing: my contact says the whole place is buzzing over the news that the head of the Cloverville Spring and Suspension Company has been lost at sea.
“His name’s Harmon Haslett, and about two weeks ago he went off for a yachting trip in Europe. Somewhere in the Bay of Biscay they picked up distress signals from the yacht during a storm. The signals abruptly ceased. Several vessels went to the location given in the signals and found no trace of the yacht except a life preserver with the name of the yacht on it. The assumption is that the yacht went down with all on board.