Jerry seemed to steel himself against her. He started speaking, and there was no verbal fumbling. His words were swift, close-clipped. His gray eyes looked into hers with tenderness, but with that determination she had seen so much of the last few days. “I don’t know what’s ahead of me,” he said. “You don’t know what’s ahead of me. There’s a nasty job of mopping up. After that, there’s got to be some face-lifting in the world. Don’t you see that at a time like this a man has to abandon and try to forget some things that mean more to him, personally, selfishly, than anything else in the world? If a man’s in love with a woman, for instance—”
His voice trailed off, as suddenly, from Matilda Shore’s bedroom, they heard the sound of some article of furniture crashing to the floor. Then, a moment later, came the unmistakable thump . . . thump . . . thump of a cane, and the shuffle of heavy steps crossing the floor. The caged lovebirds started throaty, shrill chirpings as they chattered excitedly.
“Your Aunt Matilda,” said Jerry in a hollow voice.
Helen tried to speak, but for a moment her throat was constricted so that the words wouldn’t come.
Jerry looked at her curiously. “What’s the matter, darling, you look scared.”
“That’s—that’s not Aunt Matilda.”
“Nonsense. You can’t mistake those steps. The shuffle-and-thump; and shuffle-and-thump. You can even hear the peculiar dragging sound of her foot when she . . .”
Helen’s fingers clutched his arm. “Jerry, it isn’t she! She isn’t home. She’s at a hospital.”
There was a moment while her words and her fear penetrated into Jerry’s consciousness; then he was on his feet, brushing her to one side despite her efforts to cling to his arm.
“All right, let’s see who it is.”
“No, no, Jerry! Don’t go alone. There’s danger! Something horrible happened tonight. I didn’t want to tell you, but . . .”
He might or might not have heard her. She only knew her words had no effect. With his jaw set, he moved swiftly toward the closed door into the corridor leading to Matilda’s bedroom.
“Where’s the light switch?” he asked.
Helen raced to his side, suddenly aware that Jerry, a stranger to the house, was groping his way through half darkness.
She clicked on the light switch. “Jerry, be careful. Oh, my dear, please . . .”
From behind Aunt Matilda’s bedroom door, there was a silence as though the intruder might be standing still—or might be moving with catlike stealth to surprise Jerry when he opened the door. Only the high-pitched chatter of the lovebirds grew to a hysterical crescendo of bird talk.
“Please, Jerry,” she whispered. “Don’t open it. If someone should be in there and . . .”
He said, “Let go of my arm.”
She still clung to him.
“Let go of my arm,” he repeated, shaking her off. “I may need that arm. Let’s see what this is all about.”
He turned the knob of the door, raised his foot, and kicked it open.
A gust of cold air billowing in from an open window came sweeping through the doorway into the corridor. The room was dark save for the illumination which flowed in from the lighted hallway, an illumination which threw a grotesque, distorted shadow of Jerry Templar along the floor of the bedroom. The birds became suddenly silent.
“The lights,” Helen said, and darted past Jerry’s side to reach for the light switch.
He grabbed her shoulder. “Don’t be a fool. Keep out of this. Tell me . . .”
A stabbing spurt of flame came from the dark corner near the head of Matilda’s bed. A bluish red spurt of flame that was ringed with orange. The report of the gun boomed through the confines of the room. She heard the bullet smack against the door jamb, even as a swift whisper of air brushed her face. She saw the drab darkness of the wood burst into lighter colored splinters as the wood beneath the aged exterior was ripped into view by the bullet. She felt the blast of fine particles of wood and plaster stinging her skin.
Jerry had her shoulder then, was jerking her back, shielding her body with his own.
The gun roared again.
That second bullet hit with a meaty “smok” against something at her side. She felt Jerry’s body, close to hers, spin around in a quick half circle. His hand was reaching out, clutching. Then she was frantically trying to support a dead weight. His legs buckled and he went crashing to the floor, taking her with him.
12
MASON, GETTING into his own car, waved good night to Gerald Shore, watched the tail-light on his client’s car disappear, then started his own motor.
“Whew!” Della Street exclaimed. “You certainly pick cases! If Lieutenant Tragg ever uncovers those facts . . . Good night!”
Mason grinned. “There’s only one way to keep him from uncovering those facts.”
“What’s that?”
“Give him so many other facts to uncover he won’t have time to bother with these.”
“That will only hold him back for a while,” she pointed out.
“It’s the best we can do—now.”
Mason swung his car into Hollywood Boulevard, drove halfway to Los Angeles. “I guess the time has come to call in Paul Drake,” he decided.
Della sighed. “More overhead! What do you need a private detective for? Couldn’t I do it?”
“No, you could not.”
“Well, Paul’s out anyway. He’s taking this week off and he swore that he wouldn’t go to the office or take on any job for love or money.”
“The devil! I’d forgotten.”
“You’ll have to get one of his operatives. That sweet little guy who looks like a Bedlington terrier is good. What’s his name?”
“He won’t do,” Mason said decidedly. “I need Paul.”
“He’ll just hang up on you if you call him. You know Paul.”
“Yeah, I know Paul. I guess you’re right. He’d just dust me off.”
They cruised on down the Boulevard.
“Is it really important, Perry?”
“What?”
“Getting Drake.”
“Yes.”
Della Street sighed resignedly. “All right, pull up by that all-night lunch counter ahead, and if they’ve got a telephone booth, I’ll see what I can do for you.”
“You? What makes you think you can get Paul out of bed in the middle of the night if I can’t?”
Della’s eyes dropped demurely. “You just don’t know how to appeal to Paul’s higher instincts,” she murmured. “I don’t say I can make him work, but if I can get him down to the office you ought to be able to handle him from then on.”
Perry Mason stopped in front of the lunch counter, and followed Della in. She looked around, frowning.
“Go ahead and do your stuff,” Mason said. “I’ll order us something to eat.”
Della shook her head. “This joint won’t do.”
“What’s the matter? It looks clean enough.”
“There’s no telephone booth.”
“There’s a phone on the wall over there, stupid.”
“What I’ve got to say to Paul calls for a booth,” Della drawled. “A wall telephone won’t do. Come on, we’ll have to try somewhere else.”
A few blocks further on Mason stopped the car again in front of a brilliantly lighted diner. He looked in through plate windows at the interior, shining with chromium and glass, and locked the car.
“We’re eating here whether there’s a telephone booth or not. I’m hungry.”
Inside the door, Mason pointed to the telephone booth and headed for the counter.
“Ham and eggs and coffee for me,” she called after him.
Mason said to the man behind the counter, “Two orders of ham and eggs. Keep the eggs straight up and fry them easy. Plenty of French-fried potatoes. Lots of hot coffee, and you might make up two cheeseburger sandwiches on the side.”
Five minutes later Della Street joined Mason at the counter.
“Get him?” Perry demanded.
“Yes, I got him.”
“Is he coming down to the office?”
“He’s coming down to the office—in thirty minutes.”
“Swell. Say, what’s the matter with your face? You haven’t got a fever, have you?”
“I’m blushing, you lug! I’ll never do that again, even for you. I want my coffee now.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Perry Mason said softly.
The man drew two steaming cups of fragrant, golden-brown coffee, and slid them across the counter. “You’ll like that,” he said. “Best grade I can buy. I make it in small quantities and keep it fresh.”
They perched themselves on stools, placed elbows on the counter, sipped coffee, and watched the food cooking on the gas plate, the appetizing odor of frying ham swirling past their nostrils.
“Now tell me why you need Paul Drake,” Della said.
Mason said, “I need a lot of facts dug out before Tragg closes the case with a lot of half truths.”
“Do you think Shore was telling you only half truths?”
Mason thoughtfully regarded the steaming surface of the coffee in his cup. “He was telling us the truth as he sees it. But he was seeing only a part of the picture. There’s nothing so deadly as a case built on circumstantial evidence composed of half truths.”
The cook slid hot, thick platters across the counter. Generous slices of ham, the golden yellow of fried eggs, and the rich brown of French-fried potatoes furnished a tempting visual background for the odors which came drifting up. “We eat,” Mason said, “and do our thinking afterwards.”
“Your cheeseburgers are coming right along,” the man promised, picking up the toasted buns, putting the fillings in them, spreading them thickly with white, chopped onions. “Do you want mustard?”
“Lots of it,” Mason said.
They ate silently, concentrating on their food.
Della Street pushed her coffee cup across the counter for a refill.
“Why did Matilda Shore try to keep Lieutenant Tragg from knowing someone had poisoned her?”
“Quite evidently because there’s some connection between that and the poisoned kitten.”
“Was it an attempt on her life?”
“Looks that way.”
“Any ideas?” Della asked.
“It depends on the time element. Apparently the stout was kept in an icebox.”
“What makes you think it was?”
“Wouldn’t go flat so quickly after it was opened and poisoned. Probably she keeps several bottles in an icebox.”
“How did the poisoner make certain she was going to take the poisoned drink if she keeps several bottles on hand?”
“Probably by poisoning the nearest one—or perhaps by poisoning several.”
Mason shoved a five-dollar bill across the counter and looked at his wrist watch.
The attendant at the lunch counter made change. “More coffee, yes?”
“About half a cup,” Mason said. “That’s all I have time for.” He pushed back twenty-five cents out of the change, scooped the rest into his pocket, said, “Mighty good grub. We’ll be back again sometime.”
“In a hurry?” the attendant asked.
“Uh huh.”
He peered at them shrewdly through the upper part of his spectacles. “If anybody’d ask me,” he said, “looks as though you two was headed for Yuma on a marryin’ party.”
“Nobody asked you!” Della Street said, smiling.
Mason took another twenty-five-cent piece from his pocket, slipped it under his plate.
“What’s that for?” the man asked.
“The idea,” Mason said, grinning. “Come on, Della. Let’s go.”
They raced through the streets to the building where Mason had his office. Paul Drake’s detective agency was on the same floor as the lawyer’s office but nearer the elevator. Mason opened the lighted door, looked in on the man who ran the office at night. “The boss in yet?”
“Hello, Mr. Mason—no, he is taking this week off. I thought you knew.”
“If he should drop in, don’t mention me,” Mason grinned. “Just forget you saw me.”
They walked down the long, vacant corridor, their steps echoing hollowly against the walls. Dark doors on each side lettered with the names of business firms seemed like silent sentinels of dead business. The air in the hallway was musty and stale. Mason opened the door of his private office, switched on the lights. Della Street paused as he held the door open. “That’s the elevator coming up again,” she said. “I’ll bet this is Paul Drake.”
Mason disappeared into the law library and closed the door. He could hear the steady rhythm of the approaching steps.
“It’s Paul, all right,” Della Street whispered from the other side of the door. “Nothing ever seems to change the tempo of that walk. He’s not stopping at his office.”
There was a soft knock on the door into the corridor. Della Street opened it a crack. Drake pushed it open the rest of the way, stalked in, slammed the door behind him. He looked at Della with slightly protruding eyes which held no hint of expression. Then he smiled sardonically. Tall, somewhat stooped, he had the manner of a professional undertaker making a midnight round of the mortuary.
“Hello, kid,” he said.
“Hello, Paul.” Della’s voice was uncertain.
“That was a good act. I didn’t know you had it in you.” He crossed swiftly to the door concealing Perry Mason and flung it open. “Come out of there, you cheap shyster! I’ll teach you to try the badger game on me.”
Mason came out, grinning. “I had a hunch you didn’t fall for it, but I didn’t say anything.”
There was a wail from Della Street. “You played up and led me on and pretended you thought I was serious, and all the time you were laughing at me!”
“Shucks, Della, I was admiring you. I wasn’t laughing at you.” His slow drawl was expressive, pungent. “I just know you too well.”
“Why did you come, then?” she demanded, pointing at him.
Paul Drake’s head drew in like a turtle’s, then lunged forward and snapped at the tinted red fingernail a few inches away from his face. “I figured Perry needed me, and I guess I’ve had enough vacation. I was bored stiff,” he confessed, with his peculiar husky chuckle.
“Get this woman off my neck, Perry, and let’s get to work.” He squirmed his way into his favorite, crossways position in the big, overstuffed leather chair. “What’s the excitement?”
For ten minutes Mason talked rapidly. Drake listened with his eyes closed.
“That’s the picture,” Mason wound up.
“Okay. What do I do?”
“Find out everything you can about Leech. Find out anything you can about all the members of the family, particularly what they’ve done since the hue and cry over Franklin’s disappearance died down.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. This man who telephoned Helen Kendal seems to have identified himself unmistakably as Franklin Shore, but in a case of this sort, you can’t overlook the possibility of an impostor. Now, this man Leech has either been in contact with Franklin Shore or else trying to slip over a fast one. Here’s a number,” Mason went on, opening up his notebook and tearing out a sheet of paper.
“Car license?” Drake asked.
“No. Laundry mark. Laundry mark on a handkerchief that was tied around some personal stuff that seems to have belonged to Shore. It was on the seat of the car beside Leech. Leech evidently brought them along to show that he actually was acting as intermediary for Shore.”
“Why the intermediary?”
“You’ve got me. Maybe Shore didn’t want to come back until he’d tossed his hat in the door first.”
“Would it have been kicked out?”
“Hard.”
Drake gave a low whistle. “Like that, eh?”
Mason nodded.
“Tragg know you’ve got this laundry mark?”
Drake asked.
“I don’t think so. I fumbled around and pretended to be interested in the watch. That laundry mark struck me as being peculiar, Paul. I haven’t seen laundry marks inked on the hems of handkerchiefs for some time. Most laundries don’t do it any more. We should be able to trace Franklin Shore from that laundry mark.”
“Anything else?”
“That Castle Gate Hotel seems to be . . .”
“I know the dump,” Drake interrupted. “Bunch of promoters hang out there. Slick stock men. Phoney mining-company stuff. Get-rich-quick oil businesses and that sort of thing. They don’t promote their rackets from the hotel, but use the Castle Gate as a place to hibernate when things go sour. If they start hitting the jack pot, they move into swanky hotels and apartments and put on the dog. If the police don’t get anything on them and the racket pays off, they move into the big-time. If the police do get something on them, they go to San Quentin. But when a racket doesn’t pay off, and the police haven’t anything on them, they sneak back to the Castle Gate to make contacts with each other and lie low until the beef has passed.”
“Okay,” Mason said. “Now, here’s another angle. Look back in the newspapers in 1932 and you’ll find they published a list of checks which had cleared through Franklin Shore’s account within a few days of his disappearance. You can be sure the police have dug up everything they could find out about those checks as of 1932. I want you to make a fresh investigation as of 1942.”
“Anything else?” Drake asked, jotting down notes in a leather-backed, loose-leaf notebook.
“As an incidental development,” Mason said, “a kitten was poisoned out at Matilda Shore’s house. I think Tragg will be covering all the drugstores looking for poison purchases, and it won’t do any good for us to trail along behind the police. They have the organization and the authority. They’d be bound to get the facts before we could. But you might bear in mind the poison angle.”
“What’s the kitten got to do with it?” Drake asked.
“I don’t know, but Matilda Shore was fed poison from some source—apparently the same sort of poison that was used on the kitten. There’s a chap by the name of Komo who works as houseboy. There’s some question whether he’s Japanese or Korean. Tragg has a letter and map which was mailed, special delivery, around six-thirty from a Hollywood branch post office. It sounds very Japanesy—almost too Japanesy. However, you can’t tell a thing by that. Komo might have written it, or it may have been someone who thought Komo, because of his nationality, would make a good bait for the police to snap at. You can probably get a photostatic copy of that letter. Tragg will be searching for typewriters which could have written it, and will have had an expert check it over. You can probably find out from one of the newspaper boys what has been reported by this expert—the make and model of typewriter it was written on. It looked to me like a portable owned by someone who didn’t do any serious typewriting, quite probably a man who’s owned the machine for some time.”
The Case of the Careless Kitten Page 10
