"I'm commencing to think so," Holcomb said.
"That," said Perry Mason, in a tone of finality, "shows just exactly how good a detective you are. If you'd use your brains, you'd realize that the mere fact I am a lawyer representing interests inimical to Clinton Foley would have made him very careful what he said and what he did. His manner toward me would have been one of extreme formality. I'd hardly be a friend that he'd receive in the informality of a bathrobe, with a face that was half shaven."
"Whoever did that job," Sergeant Holcomb said, "broke into the house. The first thing that happened was when the dog heard the intruder. Naturally, the dog would have ears that were more keen than those of his master. His master let the dog loose, and you had to shoot the dog in self-defense. At the sound of those shots, Clinton Foley came running into the room to see what was the matter, and you let him have it."
"You're satisfied of that?" asked Perry Mason.
"It's commencing to look that way."
"Then why don't you arrest me?"
"By God, I'm going to if you don't come clean on this thing! I never in my life ran onto a man in a murder case who was so delightfully indefinite. You say you had an appointment with Foley at eight-thirty. But you don't produce any evidence to prove it."
"What sort of evidence could I produce?"
"Didn't any one hear you make the appointment?"
"I can't remember, I'm sure. I didn't pay very much attention to it when I made it. I just made it in a casual way."
"How about the taxicab that took you out there?"
"I tell you it was a cruising cab. I don't remember what kind it was."
"You haven't got the cab receipt?"
"Certainly not. I don't go around saving receipts from taxi meters."
"What did you do with it? Drop it on the sidewalk?"
"I don't know as I ever saw it."
"You don't remember what sort of a cab you went out in? Whether it was a yellow, a checker, or a red top?"
"Hell, no! I tell you I don't remember all those details. I don't figure that I'm going to be cross-examined on everything I do. I'll tell you something else, too. As a detective, you're a false alarm. The way you reconstruct the scene of that murder shows that you don't know what happened."
"Ah," said Sergeant Holcomb, in the purring tone of one who is about to betray another into a damaging admission, "then you know what happened, do you?"
"I looked around," said Perry Mason, "the same as you did."
"Very well," Sergeant Holcomb said sarcastically, "go ahead and tell me what happened, if you will be so good."
"In the first place," said Perry Mason, "the dog was chained up when the murderer went into the house. Clinton Foley went out and saw the person who had entered the house, and talked with him for a minute. Then he went back and turned the dog loose. Then was when the dog was shot, and after that Clinton Foley was shot."
"What makes you say all of that?" asked Sergeant Holcomb. "You seem quite positive."
"Did you," asked Perry Mason with scathing sarcasm, "happen to notice a towel lying partially under the bathtub?"
Sergeant Holcomb hesitated for a moment, then said, "What of it?"
"On that towel," said Perry Mason, "was shaving cream."
"Well, what of that?"
"The towel was dropped there when Clinton Foley released the dog from the chain. Now, when a man shaves, he doesn't put shaving cream on a towel. He only gets shaving cream on a towel when he is wiping the lather from his face. He does that hastily, when he is interrupted in the middle of his shaving and wants to clean the surplus lather from his face. Now, Clinton Foley didn't do that when the dog first barked or when he first heard the intruder. He went into the other room to see what the dog was barking about, and faced an intruder. He talked with this person, and, while he was talking, he was wiping the lather off of his face onto the towel. Then something happened that made him go back and turn the dog loose. That's when the person fired the shot. You can figure it all out, from the fact that there's lather on that towel, if you want to use your brain to think with, instead of thinking up a lot of foolish questions."
There was a moment of silence in the room, then a voice said, from the shadow which formed a circle beyond the beating illumination of the shaded incandescents: "Yes, I saw that towel."
"If," said Perry Mason, "you fellows would realize something of the significance of that towel, and preserve it as evidence, you might manage to figure out how that murder took place. You have that towel analyzed, and you'll find it's packed with shaving cream that had been wiped from Clinton Foley's face. You notice there's a little lather left on his chin, but not a great deal - not as much as would be expected if he'd been shot while his face was lathered. Also, there's no trace of lather on the floor where his face was resting. I tell you, he wiped the lather off on that towel."
"I don't see what's to have kept him from wiping his face before he started out to see who was in the other room," Sergeant Holcomb protested, interested in spite of himself.
"Simply," said Perry Mason, "that he dropped the towel when he was unchaining the dog. If he had been going to unchain the dog in the first place, he wouldn't have wiped the lather from his face. He would have unchained the dog first, and then gone out and wiped the lather from his face."
"Well, then," said Sergeant Holcomb, "where's Arthur Cartright?"
"I don't know. I tried to find him earlier in the day. His housekeeper says he's gone away."
"Thelma Benton says that he ran away with Mrs. Foley," Sergeant Holcomb remarked.
"Yes," said Perry Mason, "she told me that."
"And that's what Clinton Foley told Pete Dorcas."
"So I understand," Mason said wearily. "Are we going to go over all that again?"
"No, we're not going over that again," snapped Sergeant Holcomb. "I'm simply telling you that it's exceedingly possible your client, Arthur Cartright, ran away with Mrs. Foley; that he heard from Mrs. Foley's lips a story of abuse she had suffered at the hands of her husband; that he went back, determined to kill Clinton Foley."
"And about the only evidence you've got to go on is the fact that Cartright was having some trouble with Clinton Foley and ran away with his wife. Is that right?"
"That's enough evidence to go on."
"All right," Perry Mason said, "I'm just going to puncture your theory right now. If that had happened, and Arthur Cartright went back, he would have gone back with the deliberate intention of killing Clinton Foley, isn't that right?"
"I suppose so, yes."
"All right. If he had done that, he would have gone into the house, seen Clinton Foley, pointed a gun at him and gone bang, bang, right away. He wouldn't have stood around and argued while Foley was wiping the lather from his face. He wouldn't have stood still and let Foley go back and unchain a savage police dog. The only trouble with you guys is that you find a dead man and immediately start looking for some one who would make a good suspect. You don't look at the evidence and try to see where that evidence points."
"Where does it point?" asked Sergeant Holcomb.
"Hell!" said Perry Mason wearily. "I've done damn near all the detective work on this case so far. I'm not going to do all of your work for you. You're the one that's drawing pay for the job; I'm not."
"From all we can understand," said Sergeant Holcomb, "you've drawn pretty good pay to date for everything that you've done in the case."
Perry Mason gave an audible yawn.
"That," he said, "is one of the relative advantages of my profession, Sergeant. It also has corresponding disadvantages."
"Such as?" Sergeant Holcomb asked curiously.
"Such as the fact that one gets paid entirely on one's ability," Mason remarked. "The only reason I collect good money for what I do, is because I've demonstrated my ability to do it. If the taxpayers didn't give you your salary check every month until you'd delivered results, you might have to go hungry a few months, - unless you showed more i
ntelligence than you're showing on this case."
"That'll do," said Sergeant Holcomb in a voice that quivered with indignation. "You can't sit here and insult me like that. You're not going to get anywhere with it, Mason, and you might as well realize it. This isn't a case where you're just an attorney. Dammit! You're a suspect."
"So I gathered," Mason said. "That's the reason I made the remark."
"Look here," Holcomb announced, "either you are lying about going out there at eight-thirty, or else you're being deliberately vague about it so that you can confuse the issue. Now, an examination shows that Foley was killed around seven-thirty to eight o'clock. He'd been dead more than forty minutes when the Homicide Squad got there. All you've got to do is to show where you were between seven-thirty and eight, and you'll be out of it as a suspect. Why the devil don't you cooperate with us?"
"I'm telling you," said Perry Mason, "that I don't know just what I was doing at that time. I didn't even bother to look at my watch. I went out and had dinner, strolled around and smoked a cigarette, went to the office, and then went back down to the street, walked around a little bit, thinking and smoking, picked up a cruising cab and went out to keep my appointment."
"And the appointment was at eight-thirty?"
"The appointment was at eight-thirty."
"But you can't prove it."
"Of course not. Why the devil should I have to prove the time of every appointment I've made? I'm a lawyer. I see people by appointments. I make lots of appointments during the day. As a matter of fact, in place of being a suspicious circumstance, the fact that I can't prove the time of the appointment, is the one thing that shows the appointment was made in ordinary business routine.
"If I could produce a dozen witnesses to show you that I'd made an appointment to talk over something with Clinton Foley, you would immediately commence to wonder why I had gone to all that trouble to show the time of the appointment. That is, you would if you had any brains.
"Now, I'll tell you something else. What the hell was to have prevented me going out to the house at seven-thirty, killing Foley, taking a taxicab back uptown, picking up another taxicab, and coming out to the house at eight-thirty to keep my appointment?"
There was a moment of silence in the room, and then Sergeant Holcomb said, "Nothing, as far as I can see."
"That's just the point," said Perry Mason. "Only, in the event I'd done that, I'd have been pretty much inclined to take the number of the taxicab that took me out there at eight-thirty, and to have had witnesses to the fact that my appointment was at eight-thirty, wouldn't I?"
"I don't know what you'd do," said Sergeant Holcomb irritably. "When you start in on a case you don't do anything logically. You just act goofy all the way through it. Why the devil don't you come through and be frank with us, and go home and go to bed and let us get working on the case?"
"I'm not stopping you from working on the case," Perry Mason said, "and I'm not particularly keen about having these lights blazing into my eyes while you detectives sit around and stare at my face, thinking you can find something in my facial expression that's going to give you a clew. If you'd turn out the lights and sit in the dark and think for a while, it would do you a damn sight more good than sitting around in a circle and looking at my face."
"Well, it's not a face I'm crazy about looking at," Sergeant Holcomb said irritably.
"How about Thelma Benton?" asked Perry Mason. "What was she doing?"
"She's got a complete alibi. She can account for every minute of her time."
"By the way," said Perry Mason, "what were you doing at that time, Sergeant?"
Sergeant Holcomb's voice showed surprise.
"Me?" he asked.
"Sure, you."
"Are you going to try and make me a suspect?" he asked.
"No," said Perry Mason. "I was just asking you what you were doing."
"I was on my way up to the office, here," said Sergeant Holcomb. "I was in an automobile, somewhere between the house and the office."
"How many witnesses can you bring to prove it?" asked Mason.
"Don't be funny," Sergeant Holcomb told him.
"If you'd use your noodle, you'd see that I'm not being funny," Mason remarked. "I'm serious as hell. How many witnesses can you bring to prove it?"
"None, of course. I can show when I was at my house, and I can show the time I arrived at the office."
"That's the point," said Mason.
"What is?" asked Sergeant Holcomb.
"The point that should make you suspicious about this perfect alibi of Thelma Benton's. Whenever a person can show an iron clad alibi covering what they've been doing every minute of the time, it's usually a sign that they've taken a great deal of care to perfect an alibi. A person who does that either participates in the commission of a murder and fakes an alibi, or else knows a murder is going to be committed, and therefore takes great pains to make a perfect alibi."
There was a long moment of silence. Then Sergeant Holcomb said, in a voice that was almost meditative, "So you think Thelma Benton knew Clinton Foley was going to be murdered?"
"I don't know anything at all about what Thelma Benton knew or didn't know," Perry Mason remarked. "I merely told you that a person who has a perfect alibi usually has a reason for it. In the ordinary run of a day's business, a person doesn't have an alibi for every minute of the time. He can't prove where he was, any more than you can prove it. I'll bet there isn't a man in the room who can prove, absolutely, by witnesses, what he was doing every minute between seven-thirty and eight o'clock tonight."
"Well," Holcomb remarked wearily, "it's a cinch you can't."
"Sure," said Mason, "and if you weren't so dumb, that would be the best proof of my innocence, instead of an indication of my guilt."
"And you can't prove that you went to the house at eight-thirty. There's no one who saw you go there; no one knows you had an appointment? No one who let you in? No one who saw you there at all at eight-thirty?"
"Sure," said Perry Mason, "I can prove that."
"How?" asked Sergeant Holcomb.
"By the fact," Perry Mason said, "that I called police headquarters shortly after eight-thirty and told them about the murder. That shows I was there at eight-thirty."
"You know that isn't what I mean," Sergeant Holcomb told him. "I mean can you prove that you just came there at eight-thirty?"
"Certainly not, we've already gone over that."
"I'll say we've gone over it," Sergeant Holcomb said. He scraped back his chair and got to his feet.
"You win, Mason," he said. "I'm going to let you go. You're pretty well established here in town, and we can put our finger on you whenever we want you. I don't mind telling you that I don't really think you did the murder, but I sure as hell think you're shielding some one, and that some one is a client of yours. I'm just going to tell you that in place of shielding your client, your conduct has made me all the more suspicious."
"Suppose you tell me just how," Mason said.
"I believe," said Sergeant Holcomb slowly, "that Arthur Cartright ran away with Foley's wife; that she told him a story of abuse, and that Cartright came back and shot Foley. Then I think that Cartright called you and told you what he'd done, and wanted to surrender himself; that you told him not to make a move until after you got there; that you went out and started Cartright going some place in a hurry, while you waited fifteen or twenty minutes, and then telephoned the police. In fact, there's no reason why you couldn't have been the one to have wiped off the dead man's face, and put the towel with the lather on it under the bathtub, near the dog chain."
"What's that make me? An accessory after the fact, or something of the sort?" asked Perry Mason.
"You're damn right it would," said Sergeant Holcomb, "and if I can ever prove it, I'm going to give you the works."
"I'm glad to hear you say so," said Perry Mason.
"Glad to hear me say what?" rasped Sergeant Holcomb.
"That you're
going to give me the works if you can prove it. The way you've been acting, I thought you intended to give me the works whether you could prove any thing or not."
Sergeant Holcomb gestured wearily. "Go ahead," he said, "and get out of here. Hold yourself in readiness so we can get you for further questioning, if we want to."
"All right," Perry Mason said, "if that's the way you feel about it, and if the interview's over, switch out this damned light. I've got a headache from it now."
CHAPTER X
PERRY MASON sat in Paul Drake's office. Paul Drake teetered in a creaky swivel chair, behind a small, battered desk. Against the far wall of the office two men sat, uncomfortably, in stiff-backed chairs.
The Case Of The Howling Dog pm-4 Page 9
