“It’s what you said,” Mason observed.
“Well, you know what I meant.”
“I don’t give a damn what you meant,” Mason commented. “I’m talking about what was said. That’s all Gertrude Lade said. She said, ‘That’s him.’”
“Well, you know what you intended her words to mean.”
Mason sighed. “She said it was him. I still contend that it was him. Dammit, it is him! I’ll go into any court on any contempt proceedings, or otherwise, and insist that it’s him. Serle is Serle. That’s all she said — ‘It’s him.’”
Judge Knox’s face softened somewhat. The ghost of a twinkle appeared at the corner of his eyes.
Mason followed his advantage. “I have a right to ask anyone in the courtroom to stand up and then point that standing person out to a witness when I’m asking a question. Try and find some law which says I can’t.”
Judge Knox regarded Mason with thoughtful eyes. At length, he said, “Mason, your mind is certainly not geared to a conventional groove. However, as a matter of justice, I am inclined to agree with you, and I don’t know but what I am, as a matter of technical law.”
Mason said, “Why not? If we’d followed this case along conventional lines, Alden Leeds would have been bound over on that fingerprint evidence. He might have been convicted.”
“He had no right to lie about it,” Kittering said.
“He didn’t lie,” Mason observed. “He kept quiet.”
“Well, he should have told us.”
“That,” Mason said, “involves another difference of opinion. However, the law at present says he doesn’t have to. If you have any objection, you’ll have to change the law.”
“He should have notified the authorities as soon as he discovered the body.”
“What makes you think he discovered the body?” Mason asked.
“You said he did.”
“I wasn’t under oath,” Mason observed.
“But you were acting as his attorney.”
“That’s right. But you can’t convict a man of a crime because of a statement his attorney has made. As a matter of fact, Leeds had never told me that he discovered the body. I’d never asked him that question in those specific words. I merely commented on what I thought had happened, in order to assist the court in arriving at a decision.”
Judge Knox smiled. “It may interest you to know, counselor,” he said to Kittering, “that they caught Serle in the corridor. I don’t want to suggest to you how you should conduct your office, but if I were a deputy district attorney, I certainly would strike while the iron was hot, and try to get a confession from him.”
“I’ll do that,” Kittering said savagely. “But I object to these damnable tactics.”
Judge Knox frowned.
Mason said, “You tapped my telephone line and listened in on confidential...”
“That isn’t the point,” Kittering interrupted. “The point is, that you tried to trick that...”
“What I did was perfectly legal,” Mason cut in, “but tapping our line was manifestly illegal. However, you close your eyes to that. Because you were getting something on me, you were perfectly willing to overlook the manner in which the evidence was obtained. You wouldn’t have known anything about the dead man being Bill Hogarty unless you’d taken advantage of information received through tapping my telephone line. If I’d tapped anyone’s telephone line or hired a detective agency to do it, you’d have had me arrested and instituted disbarment proceedings.”
“Occasionally,” Kittering admitted to Judge Knox, “we have to condone certain irregularities in order to combat criminal activities. It’s a case where the ends justify the means.”
“The ends in this case,” Mason observed, “would have been the conviction of an innocent man of first degree murder.”
Kittering jumped to his feet. “You,” he said, “can’t...”
“I really think, counselor,” Judge Knox interrupted, “that you should get busy and start discharging the real duties of your office.”
Mason smiled across at Judge Knox. “The attitude of the prosecution,” he said, “is that they don’t care so much about who committed a murder as about keeping me from winning a case.”
“That’s not true,” Kittering shouted.
Judge Knox fastened him with a stern eye. “It seems to be true,” he observed, and then added, “If your office has been listening to privileged communications over a tapped wire, it would seem that your position is definitely precarious. You understand, counselor, that if Alden Leeds had been guilty, the situation might have been different. Leeds’ innocence, however, puts your office in an entirely different position, and puts Mason in a different position, legally, ethically, and morally.”
“Someday,” Kittering flared, “Mason will defend a guilty man, and then...”
Mason yawned, and said, “Well, if counsel doesn’t care to confide his discussion to the present, and wishes to neglect the duties of his office, to waste time in idle speculation on the future, I’d like to ask him what he thinks about railroad stocks as an investment...”
Kittering flung himself out of the door.
Judge Knox stared across at Perry Mason. “You have to admit,” he said, “that you skate on pretty thin ice, Mason — how long have you known Serle was the guilty party?”
“Not very long,” Mason admitted. “I should have known it a lot sooner than I did.”
“Why?”
“Well,” Mason explained, “it’s this way. Right from the first, the evidence showed dinner had been ordered at the Blue and White Restaurant, not in the usual manner, but in a most extraordinary manner. In other words, they didn’t ask the waiter what was on the menu and then make a selection. The waiter was told to get lamb chops, green peas, and potatoes, and if he didn’t have them available, to get them. Then again, the evidence showed right from the first that the plates were empty. It’s unusual for two men who are engaged in a hurried conference to order a dinner in that manner. It’s unusual for two men to both order the same thing. It’s unusual for men to clean up everything on the plates, and it’s absolutely unique for a man who has been eating a lamb chop to devour the bone. And you’ll remember the waiter testified that the plates were bare. Nothing remained on them.
“Moreover, it’s always been my idea that when a man has an iron-clad alibi in a murder case, it’s a very good thing to inspect that alibi closely. While a man who has a genuine alibi can’t have committed a murder, nevertheless, a man who has committed a deliberate murder always tries to provide himself with an alibi. Serle was the only one involved who had an alibi. It looked iron-clad on the face of it, but alibis should never be taken at their face value.
“It was quite apparent that the dead man had a large sum of cash in his possession. That money disappeared. It would seem, therefore, that at least one of the motives for the crime was robbery. Now Alden Leeds might have killed him because of that blackmail business, but he would never have robbed the corpse — not unless he had done so in an attempt to throw the officers off the trail. If he had done that, he would have been far too cautious to have left his fingerprints all over the apartment.
“I knew that Serle ate regularly at the Home Kitchen Café. I knew that they had a weekly menu — that is, each day of the week they featured a special, the same dish on the same day.
“The murder was committed on a Friday. Serle accompanied Conway or Milicant or Hogarty — or whatever you want to call him — to his apartment. They were both smoking cigars. At that time in the evening, a cigar usually represents an after-dinner smoke. And then I suddenly remembered what I myself had eaten at the Home Kitchen Café on Friday night — roast lamb, baked potatoes, green peas. And I had the menu that they use week after week to prove I wasn’t dreaming! A good chemical analysis would probably show the difference between beef and lamb after the digestive processes have stopped working, but the difference between roast lamb and broiled lamb, never.”