“How strong do you want to go on this, Perry?”
“I’m damned if I know, Paul. I’ve been fired with two hundred dollars for expense money.”
“Oh, oh,” Drake said. “Even if I trimmed costs to the bone, you couldn’t go very much farther on two hundred expenses. I didn’t know you were working on such a tight margin.”
“I didn’t either,” Mason said, “and I wasn’t until I spoke out of turn. My client gave me a couple of hundred, and I’ll just toss a couple of hundred into the kitty, Paul, because I’m curious.”
“What do you want done?”
“For one thing, Paul, I’d like to find out if Harmon Haslett is the sole owner of the Cloverville Spring and Suspension Company. I think he’s the son of the founder. The father has probably died or retired. I’d like a little background on this guy.
“And, of course, I’d like to find out a little more about these people who are shadowing our decoy. I’d like to find out where they are staying and whether they have any local connections. I figured this man Garland as a local detective.”
“Why?”
“He seemed to know his way around,” Mason said.
“I think he knows his way around every big city in the United States,” Drake said. “The guy has fellows working for him, and evidently he has a pretty big job. He’s a combined lobbyist, private detective, gumshoe artist, fixer and troubleshooter.”
Mason grinned. “Let me know when your bill totals four hundred dollars, Paul.”
“We stop there?” Drake asked.
Mason grinned. “How do I know?” he said. “This is interesting the hell out of me. Let’s call it a vacation.”
Drake nodded, said, “I’ll keep you posted, Perry,” and left the office.
“Get those names?” Mason asked Della Street.
Della, who had been taking notes of the conversation, nodded. “Want me to type them up?”
“No,” Mason said, “I’ll remember them. Jarmen Dayton, whom we already know, and Stephen Lockley Garland. This man Garland must be a character.”
“You,” she charged, “are going to put me in an impossible situation.”
“How come?”
“How can I explain this added two hundred dollars to the Internal Revenue Service? They’ll want to know what case it was on and where the money came from.”
Mason grinned at her. “Tell them it’s a lawyer’s vacation,” he said.
Della Street sighed. “At times you can show a great lack of sympathy for a person with secretarial responsibilities.”
Chapter Five
It was midafternoon when Paul Drake again gave his code knock on Mason’s door and Della Street let him in.
“Well, Perry,” Drake said, “I’ve had more reports from Cloverville and I can give you the picture. I don’t know what it’s all about, but the information I have can be used by you to fill in the missing parts.”
“Shoot,” Mason said.
“The Cloverville Spring and Suspension Company is virtually a one-man concern. It was operated by Harmon Haslett until his death a few days ago. His father, Ezekiel Haslett, was the founder of the company, and the company, as I told you, is virtually all there is to Cloverville.
“Haslett was unmarried at the time of his death, but he left two half brothers, Bruce Jasper and Norman Jasper.
“Rumor has it that there’s a will leaving everything to the Jaspers unless Haslett left issue.
“That is a peculiar provision in the will, because although Haslett was once married, so far as is known he never had any children.
“Now, then, I give you rank gossip, but this is a story that my operative ferreted out.
“Many years ago, during his flaming youth, Harmon Haslett got a girl in ‘trouble,’ as they said in the parlance of the times.
“The girl was all right as far as that end of it was concerned, but she wasn’t society and Haslett was the crème de la crème of Cloverville. He was supposed to make a marriage with some wealthy society queen and all that sort of stuff.
“Haslett got in a panic when he found out about the girl, and he went to Garland — our old friend Slick Garland, the troubleshooter for the company, the man who is supposed to keep the public image intact.
“At that time Harmon’s father, Ezekiel Haslett, would have raised the roof if he had known that his son had a girl in trouble.
“Good old Garland was the worldly-wise man of the picture. Apparently he said to the kid, ‘Now, take it easy, buddy; this is something that can happen to anyone.’
“ ‘I’ll tell you what you do. You get on the next boat for Europe. Stay over there for a year if necessary. At the same time I’ll send your girlfriend a thousand dollars. That’s the smart way to take care of it.’ ”
“How did you hear this?” Mason asked Drake.
“Through my operative, who, in turn, had it from a person to whom Haslett had confided the secret of his past.
“Everything worked out the way it was supposed to. Haslett went to Europe; the troubleshooter sent the girl — whose name, incidentally, was never mentioned to the person in whom Haslett confided — a thousand dollars in crisp new hundred-dollar bills in a plain, unmarked envelope.
“The girl took the money and disappeared. Up to that point everything went according to schedule.
“There was only one flaw: the girl didn’t come back.
“Now that started worrying Haslett. He felt that if the girl had had things fixed up, within the course of time she would have returned. But she never came back. Her parents apparently had never heard from her, and eventually they moved away. I believe the father died and the mother remarried.
“Haslett felt that somewhere he might have an illegitimate child. He spent money trying to find some trace of the girl. He couldn’t even get a clue.
“Now, then, the half brothers want to be able to prove that there never was any child — or if there was a child, they want to prove that it wasn’t Haslett’s child.
“Their idea is to locate the woman in the case, to get her to confide in some clever female operative, and to find out what happened to the illegitimate child; and if the child is still alive, they want to be able to prove that the father was someone other than Haslett.
“Haslett never even intimated that the child wasn’t his, although the troubleshooter, good old Slick Garland, kept implanting doubts in Haslett’s mind.”
“He could trust Garland to protect his secret?” Mason asked.
“Apparently Garland was one of those troubleshooters who knew what to do and went ahead and did it and then knew how to keep his mouth shut.”
“Looking at it from young Haslett’s point of view, you can see the logic of the situation and the fact that he was getting sound advice,” Mason said.
“Does anyone look at it from the girl’s point of view?” Della asked.
“Apparently Garland did,” Drake said; “but he just may have sized her up a hundred per cent wrong.”
Mason glanced at Della Street.
“The fact that she never returned home, never kept in touch with her parents, is certainly indicative of the fact that she didn’t do what they planned for her to do.”
Mason and Della Street exchanged glances.
“Now, then,” Drake went on, “you’re dealing with some mysterious woman. You substituted a ringer, a decoy. You haven’t told me anything about the case, other than that you wanted a decoy of a certain description. I furnished you that decoy. I don’t know anything about the case except what you’ve told me and what I’ve reported to you. I imagine you can’t tell me anything more without betraying the confidence of a client, but here’s the information. I’ve dumped it in your lap.”