Mason shrugged his shoulders and said calmly, "You can search me. Hysterics, I guess."
The matron led Julia Branner from the room.
Mason paced the floor of his office impatiently. Della Street, worried, sat at her desk, an open notebook in front of her. Paul Drake, freshly emerged from a Turkish bath, sprawled over the leather chair. His cold had vanished, save for an occasional sniffle.
"Tell me what you know first," Mason said to the detective, "and then I'll tell you what I know."
Drake said, "The case is nutty, Perry, any way you want to look at it. I wish you'd get out of it and stay out of it. Julia Branner is a bad egg. There's no question but what she bumped him off. There's a lot of other stuff mixed in it, but I don't think it's going to do you any good. There's…"
"What's the other stuff?" Mason asked.
"Janice Brownley took her car out of the garage less than five minutes after the old man left," Drake said, "and young Brownley followed her out. A couple of detectives, Victor Stockton and Pete Sacks, have been handling the thing for Janice Brownley and probably for the old man. Now Janice…"
"Wait a minute," Mason interrupted. "We were wondering who had fallen heir to Jaxon Eaves' cut. Now why don't these two detectives fit into that picture? You told me yourself that Eaves collected a twenty-five thousand dollar bonus for finding the girl and undoubtedly had an arrangement by which he was going to get a cut out of any inheritance she received."
Drake shook his head lugubriously. "That won't do you any good, Perry," he said. "Let's suppose that Eaves did run in a ringer. Let's suppose Stockton and Sacks did inherit his interest in the case. That doesn't help you any, because Julia Branner couldn't find the real granddaughter any more than Eaves could, so she decided to run in a ringer and collect, but she got vicious about it and evidently got tied up with a gang of crooks. The theory the D.A.'s working on-and he's got some straight dope on it from someone-is that Julia decided to wait until Bishop Mallory was taking a sabbatical year where he couldn't be reached, then she was to have someone who claimed to be Bishop Mallory contact a lawyer with a build-up. She picked on you. After you'd been sold, you were to pull the chestnuts out of the fire. But she couldn't even wait for that. She bumped off Brownley to keep him from upsetting her apple cart. Remember, she hated his guts. Personally, I think the woman's a little off in the upper story. She's brooded over this thing until she's nutty, and she's just at an age when you can't tell what form her nuttiness is going to take.
"At that, these detectives took an unfair advantage. Sacks is just a big bruiser, but Stockton is deadly as hell. He's got brains, and don't ever kid yourself he hasn't. Sacks, acting under instructions from Stockton, contacted Julia and gave her a song and dance about being a torpedo who would bump off anyone so it could never be traced, and Julia fell for it hook line, and sinker… That's the story I get from the newspaper men. And I think Jaxon Eaves used Sacks in the original substitution-getting him to pump Julia. Then afterward, when Eaves died, Sacks cut Stockton in on the deal."
"Why can't Pete Sacks be lying?" Mason asked. "If there's a big cut coming to him of the inheritance, why wouldn't he make this whole story up out of whole cloth, just so he could get Julia in bad?"
Drake shrugged his shoulders and said, "He would, but the D.A. believes he's telling the truth. Perhaps you can make a jury believe he's lying, but what's the D.A. going to be doing with you, before you get Sacks before a jury?"
"Do you know anything more about where Janice Brownley went?" Mason asked.
"She's got an air-tight alibi."
"Really air-tight, or does it just look air-tight?"
"It looks air-tight, and I think it is air-tight. Victor Stockton has already reported to the D.A. He says Janice telephoned him that she thought her grandfather had gone out to make some sort of a deal with Julia Branner, and she wanted to talk things over with Stockton. Stockton wanted to come to see her, but she said she was all dressed and could drive down to his place quicker, so Stockton told her to come ahead. He lived down on Fifty-second Street, and, as I told you, he's a foxy guy. He had his wife present when Janice arrived, and then he went across the hall and got a notary public out of bed and had the notary come in."
"And the notary was there all the time?"
"Yes."
"In the same room with Janice and Stockton?"
"That's my understanding."
Mason shook his head and said, "I don't like it, Paul."
"You shouldn't," Drake said grimly.
"If Bishop Mallory was the real McCoy," Mason said. "then…"
Della Street interrupted to say, "There's another wireless from Captain Johanson on the Monterey, Chief. They've found a couple of suitcases labeled 'William Mallory, Stateroom 211,' but Stateroom 211 is taken by people who don't answer the description of William Mallory and claim they never heard of him. The suitcases contain several yards of bandage and a suit of black broadcloth, an ecclesiastical collar, and black shoes. They were delivered to Stateroom 211 together with the baggage which really belonged there."
Mason sat down at his desk and made little drumming motions with the tips of his fingers. "And that doesn't make sense," he said. "Suppose Bishop Mallory is a phoney. Then where is the real bishop? On the other hand, if this was the real bishop, why should he have played ring-around-the-rosy and ducked out of the picture?"
Drake shrugged his shoulders and said, "I've got one more thing on Bishop Mallory. This is a tip which Jim Pauley, the house dick at the Regal Hotel, gave me. Before we had the bishop spotted, and before our men got on the job, a man called on Mallory. His name was Edgar Cassidy. Pauley knows him. He visited the bishop in his room and was there for about half an hour."
Mason's face showed keen interest. "Good Lord, Paul," he said, "this is the break we've been looking for. Someone who knows the bishop could tell us whether…"
"Hold everything," Drake interrupted. "It's just a false alarm. I rushed men out to interview Cassidy. He said that a friend of his in Sydney had written him Bishop Mallory was a good scout and was going to be visiting in Los Angeles at the Regal Hotel and to do anything he could for the bishop. Cassidy's quite a yachtsman. He has a neat little job, the Atina, which he uses for swordfishing. He thought the bishop might like to go out, so he dropped in to get acquainted. His testimony isn't going to help you a damned bit. He said his friend had told him the bishop was an enthusiastic fisherman, but when he contacted the bishop he didn't even get to first base. The bishop apparently wasn't interested in fishing and wasn't even cordial. Cassidy was sore when he left."
Mason resumed pacing the floor. Suddenly he paused to turn to the detective. "Cassidy's a yachting enthusiast," Mason said. "Find out if Cassidy knows Bixler. When you stop to think of it, Bixler's story about walking through the rain at that hour in the morning sounds just a little bit goofy."
Drake pulled a notebook from his pocket, scribbled a note and said without enthusiasm, "Okay, I'll find that out."
"And in the meantime," Mason said significantly, "it might be a good-plan if Pauley didn't say anything to the D.A.'s men about Cassidy. I don't suppose they could use Cassidy's testimony, because it's all hearsay and conclusions, but I'd just as soon the newspapers didn't get hold of it."
Drake grinned and said, "Don't worry, Perry, that's all taken care of already. Pauley's a good friend of mine, and a little salve goes a long way with him… How about young Brownley? We can't find out anything about where he was when the murder was committed, but his car wasn't in the garage this morning."
"I've talked with him," Mason said, "and he's going to talk with the D.A. His story isn't going to hurt Janice Brownley at all, but I still think there's something phoney about that alibi, and I don't trust Stockton."