“Okay,” Mason said, grinning.
“All right,” Drake assured them, “I’m going down to my office and start handling calls from there.”
He left the office and Sue Fisher turned uneasily to Mason. “You haven’t asked me for money yet.”
“That’s right, I haven’t,” Mason told her, smiling.
“I’m a working girl on a salary, Mr. Mason, and— Well, I didn’t want to say anything in front of Mr. Drake, but I simply can’t afford all these detectives and all of this high-priced action.”
“That’s all right,” Mason told her. “Right at the present time this is my party.”
“But even so, Mr. Mason, I just haven’t got enough—”
“Miss Corning has money,” Mason interposed.
She raised puzzled eyebrows.
Mason merely smiled.
After a few moments, Sue Fisher said, “But, Mr. Mason, Miss Corning isn’t going to pay for my legal expenses.”
“Certainly not,” Mason told her. “But I think we may be helping Miss Corning do something that she wants to do very much indeed. This makes for a very interesting situation.”
Della Street smiled at Susan Fisher and said, “Just get a magazine from the outer office and make yourself comfortable. We have work to do and we’re going to have to utilize every minute.”
Della Street went to her office and presently the keyboard of her typewriter exploded into noise. Mason picked up a copy of the “Advance Decisions,” and said to Sue Fisher, “I’m so busy that it’s awfully hard to keep up on these new decisions. If it weren’t for moments like these I wouldn’t be able to catch up.”
Sue nodded, went to the waiting-room, then tiptoed back with several magazines. She tried to read for a while, then, finding herself too excited to get lost in the printed page, left the magazines on her lap and sat quietly watching Mason’s face, noticing that his concentration was so great that he seemed to have completely dismissed her from his mind.
The phone shattered the silence within thirty minutes after Paul Drake had left the room. Della Street, hurrying to the telephone, said, “Hello,” then said, “Yes, what is it, Paul?”
She listened with a frown, then said, “I think you’d better come down... Yes, she’s still here.”
Della Street hung up the telephone and said, “Paul’s corning down. They’ve uncovered a peculiar situation.”
“I thought perhaps they would,” Mason said, putting down the paper-backed “Advance Decisions.”
Della Street moved over to stand by the door.
“He has his offices on this floor?” Susan Fisher asked.
Mason nodded.
Drake’s knock sounded on the door and Della Street had the door open with the first touch of the detective’s knuckles.
“Well?” Mason asked, as Drake entered the room.
Drake shook his head. “Something goofy, Perry.”
“What?”
“All right,” Drake said, “here’s what happened. She made no attempt to cover up on her arrival at the depot. She attracted a lot of attention. She had four suitcases. Two of them were very heavy, as though they contained books of some sort.”
“Or bottles,” Mason said, grinning.
“Or bottles,” Drake admitted. “Somehow the redcap thought they were books.
“She wanted the suitcases put in some of the key lockers, where you drop a quarter, put in the suitcase, close the door, turn the key, and walk away.”
Mason nodded.
“She got rid of all the suitcases, gave the porter a good tip, and then went whizzing along in her wheelchair towards the ladies’ room — and completely disappeared.
“Didn’t enter the ladies’ room?” Mason asked.
“No one knows. From that point she just vanished into thin air.”
“You covered the trains?”
“Train dispatchers, redcap porters, ticket sellers, everybody. We got the redcap porter who had put the suitcases in the lockers for her to point out the lockers. We got one of the locker superintendents with a pass-key to open them.”
“Empty?” Mason asked.
“Empty,” Drake said.
“That,” Mason said, “is what I was afraid of.”
“What?” Susan Fisher asked.
Mason’s face hardened. “I told you,” he said, “that a woman of fifty-five, with dark blue glasses, a woman who is almost blind and confined to a wheelchair couldn’t go to a public place like the Union Depot and simply disappear into thin air.”
“I know you did,” Sue Fisher said, “but—”
Mason smiled as she broke off.
Sue Fisher went on, “But she seems to have done it?”
Mason turned to Paul Drake. “Paul,” he said, “I want you to close up every possible avenue out of that Union Depot. I want your men to get to work and cover everything. Everything, you understand? I want to know every way by which a person could leave that depot, and I want every one of those ways checked. I don’t care if they have to stay on the job all night.”
“Will do,” Drake promised, and left the office.
Sue Fisher said, “Can you tell me what you’re afraid of, Mr. Mason?”
Mason said, “A woman of that sort couldn’t vanish into thin air. Therefore, if she did vanish into thin air, we have to start out with the idea that our premise is wrong.”
“You mean that she couldn’t do what she actually did?”
“No,” Mason said, “I mean that she wasn’t a woman of that description.”
“You mean...? Are you trying to tell me that...?”
“Suppose,” Mason suggested, “this woman was an impostor? You don’t know Amelia Corning. You’re the only one who saw her. She called you and said she was Amelia Corning. She looked like the Amelia Corning you’ve had described to you. You went down to the airport. She was sitting there surrounded with luggage with South American labels — that alone may be a significant fact.”
“What do you mean?”
Mason said, “Under ordinary circumstances, the baggage would have been held in the checkroom of the airport. This woman was sitting in the lobby in a wheelchair. She had the baggage around her. Now, how did she get it there? Obviously she didn’t go and pick up the baggage and carry it in a wheelchair. Therefore, she must have had a porter bring it to her.
“Now, why would she have done that? It would have been far more logical for her to have left the baggage stored in the baggage room until she had her transportation ready and then she’d let the porter take it out to the place where her transportation was waiting.
“The idea of a woman sitting right in the middle of the lobby in a wheelchair with baggage piled around her and that baggage ostentatiously plastered with labels of South American hotels indicates that she was very, very anxious to have you identify her the moment you walked in and to take her for granted.
“That thing bothered me,” Mason said, “when you told me about it. But afterwards, after you described her character, I came to the conclusion she might be just the sort of person who would insist on keeping her baggage under her eye, so I tried to dismiss the thought from my mind. However, that’s one of the reasons I’ve been worried about this case.”
“Then you yourself feel the woman was an impostor?”
“I don’t know,” Mason said. “I do know that from the minute you told me about her sitting there in the airport with the luggage around her I began to consider that as a possibility.
“Now, if she’s an impostor, you must admit she made a pretty good haul. She got away with a lot of incriminating evidence against Endicott Campbell, which would give her good grounds for blackmail, and she probably got away with a shoe box containing heaven knows how many thousands of dollars and—”