The Case of the Borrowed Brunette

by The Case of the Borrowed Brunette (retail) (epub)

  “Drake,” Paul said.

  “Oh yes, thank you very much, Mr. Drake, for your coöperation.”

  “Coöperation?” Drake asked.

  She smiled. “You didn’t interrupt! Good morning.”

  14

  MASON ENTERED his private office, scaled his hat at the hat rack, and said to Della Street, “Get Harry Gulling on the line as soon as you can. Then tell me what else is new.”

  She spun the telephone dial. “The mail came in. There are quite a few letters—two or three on top you should do something about at once.”

  Mason picked up the top letters and glanced at them. “Okay, I’ll send a wire.”

  She motioned toward the telephone.

  Mason picked up the instrument and said, “Hello.”

  Harry Gulling’s voice contained no more warmth than the sound of ice cubes clinking in a frosted glass. “Good morning, Mr. Mason,” he said. “I’m sorry you didn’t see fit to comply with my ultimatum.”

  Mason jerked his watch out of his pocket. “What the devil are you talking about?” he said. “It’s still three minutes till noon.”

  “Well?” Gulling asked.

  “And my client has surrendered herself at the county jail.”

  “Not surrendered herself,” Gulling corrected acidly. “She has been apprehended.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “There is, of course, rather an ingenious story,” Gulling said, “which quite apparently was carefully worked out to cover the situation in case she couldn’t get away. However, Mr. Mason, if you are going to gamble, you have to face the fact that gamblers often lose.”

  “I’m still in the dark.”

  “The chance you took.”

  “I didn’t take any chance.”

  “Perhaps you think you didn’t, but you’ve lost. And when a man stakes his future on a chance and loses, I’d say he was gambling. However, have it your own way.”

  Mason said, “I think if you’ll investigate you’ll find that well before twelve o’clock Eva Martell appeared at police headquarters in a taxi she herself had paid for, and surrendered herself into custody.”

  “She appeared at police headquarters all right, but she wasn’t in a taxi. She was in the custody of a radio officer who picked her up as she was riding along the street near the apartment she shared with Cora Felton, and she was headed in the direction of the airport.”

  “All right—the taxicab was on its way to police headquarters.”

  “Sure,” Gulling said. “That’s what she told the officer, but the taxi driver doesn’t say so. The cab was headed in the opposite direction.”

  “What does the driver say?”

  “He picked her up and was instructed to drive down certain streets. She didn’t tell him what her destination would be. Of course, that’s an old dodge, telling a taxi where to turn and then—in case you’re picked up—be very wide-eyed and innocent and say that you’re headed for police headquarters. As far as this office is concerned, Mason, it was up to you to deliver your client before twelve o’clock. There have been too many legal flimflams in cases where you’ve been the attorney on the other side. We are not disposed to give you any breaks now. You had until twelve o’clock to get that girl down here. From our point of view, you didn’t do it. For all we know, she may have been going to the airport.”

  “But that is utterly unfair!”

  “It’s keeping within the letter of our agreement, Mr. Mason.”

  “All right,” Mason said angrily, “now I’ll tell you something. Go ahead and do whatever you damn please. I’m going to represent Eva Martell and I’m going to represent Adelle Winters, and I’ll give you folks the biggest surprise you ever had.”

  “You mean you’re going to represent Adelle Winters?” Gulling asked, unable to keep the surprise out of his voice.

  “Of course I am,” Mason said. “The only way I can get Eva Martell off is to be certain that the defense of Adelle Winters isn’t bungled.”

  “She hasn’t any defense.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  “Well, Mr. Mason,” Gulling said, and now his voice was purring with satisfaction, “you have an interesting record so far in murder acquittals. I don’t think anything would suit this office better than to have you represent Adelle Winters. I’ll be very glad to arrange things so that you can see your client any time. And as far as your case is concerned, I’ll explain to the Grand Jury that you had an understanding with this office which you failed to keep. Incidentally, there’s a woman named Mae Bagley to whom you’d better give some legal advice.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s running a rooming house at the address where the taxi driver says he picked Eva Martell up. She says she never saw Eva Martell before in her life, and never rented her a room. We’re going to subpoena her before the Grand Jury. You might tell her something about the law in regard to perjury.”

  “That’s fine,” Mason said. “Get her to come to my office to ask for legal advice. If I decide I want her as a client, I’ll advise her what the law really is.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “My conception may differ from yours.”

  “Before you get done with this case,” Gulling promised him grimly, “you’ll have revised your ideas of the law as it relates to harboring a fugitive from justice.”

  “Prove that I harbored one,” Mason challenged. “Prove it beyond all reasonable doubt in front of a jury. And the next time, try to be a little more coöperative.” And he terminated the conversation by slamming down the receiver.

  He found Della Street watching him apprehensively.

  “What happened, Chief?”

  “Probably a stroke of luck,” Mason said. “Evidently one of the radio officers who questioned Eva Martell yesterday was cruising around and happened to spot her in a taxicab. She’d made the mistake of not wanting to tell the driver to go directly to police headquarters—probably because she was a little sensitive. She told him what streets to take, evidently intending to pay him off a block or so from headquarters and walk the rest of the way. A matter of silly pride.”

  “But surely Gulling will understand that?”

  “Gulling understands nothing except the letter of the law,” Mason said. “And he’s particularly anxious to put me in the position of being an accessory after the fact. His position will doubtless be that I take all technical advantage of the law and that there is no reason why the district attorney’s office shouldn’t do the same.”

  “You mean they’ll actually charge you with something?”

  “They may. Anyhow, they’ll hold it over my head. They can’t charge me with anything unless they can get some evidence to connect me with harboring Eva Martell.”

  “What’s Eva doing?”

  “Apparently she is following my instructions and saying nothing to anyone, beyond stating to the officer who arrested her that she was on her way to police headquarters to surrender.”

  “Won’t they be able to make Mae Bagley talk?”

  “She is talking,” Mason said with a grin. “She’s telling them that she never saw Eva Martell in her life, much less rented her a room!”

  “But that’s perjury, isn’t it?”

  “Not unless she makes the statement under oath,” Mason replied. “They’ll have to establish that it’s perjury beyond all reasonable doubt, in front of a jury. And there’s a rather technical point about perjury that Mr. Gulling seems to have overlooked.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Perjury must be established by the testimony of two witnesses.”

  “Do you suppose Mae Bagley knows that, Chief?”

  There was a twinkle in Mason’s eye. “She may know something about the law of perjury. . . .”

  “What was she charged with when you defended her and got her off, Chief?”

  Mason lit a cigarette and closed one eye in a slow wink.

  “Perjury,” he said.

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nbsp; 15

  MONDAY MORNING’S paper was interesting Perry Mason a good deal. Sitting in his office, he had it spread on the desk before him, and he was carefully reading the long and startlingly headlined story on the front page. It ran:

  “WOMEN ACCUSED OF HINES MURDER TO BE DEFENDED BY PERRY MASON

  Legal Wizard To Defend Both Adelle Winters and Eva Martell—D.A.’s Office Seeks To Link Lawyer with Concealment of His Client

  Developments in connection with the murder of Robert Dover Hines were whizzing along with bewildering rapidity over the week end. Perry Mason, the noted criminal lawyer whose successes have made his name almost a household word, has announced that he is defending both Adelle Winters and Eva Martell. The retort of the district attorney’s office to this was to rush Miss Mae Bagley, a rooming-house manager, before a night session of the Grand Jury. The police claim that on the night of the murder Perry Mason managed to whisk Eva Martell out from under their noses and keep her in concealment until after she had been thoroughly coached by someone in what to say, or rather in what not to say.

  Mae Bagley, it is understood, cheerfully told the Grand Jury all that she didn’t know. She was, she insisted, running a respectable rooming house and conforming with all the legal requirements. She had never seen Eva Martell in her life, much less rented her a room.

  Confronted with the fact that the driver of the taxicab in which Eva Martell was riding says that he was summoned to the rooming house operated by Mae Bagley and that he there picked up Eva Martell who was riding in his cab when police made the arrest, Miss Bagley has a whole fistful of explanations, starting with the simple statement that the taxi driver is mistaken. She points out that there are several rooming houses in the immediate vicinity, and that anyone can easily summon a taxi to go to a certain address and then be standing there in the doorway when it drives up, even if that isn’t where he actually lives. She ventured a wager with the Grand Jury that she herself could summon a taxicab to call for her at the home of the assistant district attorney, could appear at his front door at the exact moment the taxicab arrived, and could—by walking down to the cab and drawing on her gloves as she left the door—create in the driver’s mind the impression that she had stayed there all night—an experience which, Mae Bagley forcefully pointed out, she had no intention of enjoying.

  It was rumored that her testimony brought smiles to the faces of many of the grand jurors, and that Harry Gulling, who has been in charge of mapping strategy in the case for the D.A.’s office, was plainly nettled at the answers he received. Threats of a prosecution for perjury are said to have been repeatedly made without having the slightest effect on the witness.

  So far as the case against the two principal defendants is concerned, Gulling points out dryly that, according to Eva Martell’s sworn statement, she was with Adelle Winters every minute of the day on which the shooting concededly occurred. Robert Hines was killed, Gulling points out, with a gun concededly owned by Adelle Winters—a gun which, according to an eye-witness, Mrs. Winters endeavored to conceal in a garbage pail at a downtown hotel shortly after the shooting. At the time of her arrest, she was found to have Hines’s wallet on her person, and the murder concededly was committed in an apartment occupied at the time by Adelle Winters. If, Gulling points out, Perry Mason can find some explanation for those facts consistent with the innocence of his clients, “we might,” to quote the assistant district attorney, “just as well throw the law books away, give Perry Mason the keys to the jail, and provide his clients with hunting licenses good for at least one victim a day.”

  There is no secret among courthouse attachés that this is something of a grudge fight of long standing. Gulling, who is recognized by those who know their way around as the mainspring in actuating strategy in the district attorney’s office, is out to get Perry Mason. While Gulling seldom appears in court, he is reputed among attorneys to have a keen, methodical mind and an encyclopedic knowledge of the law.

  Both prosecution and defense have signified their desire to have an early trial, and it is understood that a date left open by the continuance of another case has been tentatively suggested by Gulling, who is particularly anxious to get the murder cases disposed of so that an attempt to prosecute Perry Mason will have no legal obstacles to hurdle. It has been suggested further . . .”

  Mason didn’t bother to turn to the inside page. He folded the paper, tossed it to one side, and said to Della Street, “Della, I have a letter I want you to write.”

  She whipped open her notebook and held her pencil ready.

  “This letter,” Mason instructed her, “is not to be typed. It must be written in longhand on a delicately perfumed sheet of stationery. It will read: ‘Dear Mr. Mason. I hope you won’t think I did wrong in telling the Grand Jury I had never seen Eva Martell in my life. Things happened so fast I didn’t have any time to get in touch with you and wasn’t sure just what I should do under the circumstances. However, I remembered that when I last heard from you, you told me that you wanted me to put her in a room where—— But I guess I’d better say this in our code.’”

  Della Street looked up with surprise, her eyebrows raised interrogatively.

  “Now,” Mason said, “let’s devise a code that no one can decipher!”

  “I thought experts could decipher any code.”

  “They can,” Mason answered with a grin, “provided the code means anything! You, Della, will fill the rest of that sheet of social stationery with letters and numbers, all mixed together and broken up into words containing five characters each. See that there are both numbers and letters in each word. And when you finish it, sign the letter ‘Mae’ and bring it in to me.”

  “No last name?”

  “No last name—just ‘Mae.’”

  “Chief, what in the world are you doing? It’s manufacturing evidence that will put your neck in a noose!”

  “Exactly,” Mason said. “When you have written the letter, go to the bank and get me seven hundred and fifty dollars in cash. And,” he warned as Della started for the door, “be sure to see that the handwriting in the letter is unmistakably feminine.”

  “Any particular type of stationery?” Della asked.

  “I think Mae would buy a box of pale-rose or something of that sort; and don’t forget the perfume!”

  “I won’t,” she promised. “I’ll get started right now.” And she left the office.

  A few minutes later Paul Drake’s code knock sounded on the door of Mason’s private office. The lawyer crossed over to open it.

  “Hello, Paul, what’s new?”

  “Lots of things,” Drake said. “When I got to my office I found a collection of stuff.”

  “Important?”

  “I think it’s damned important, Perry.”

  Drake crossed over to the big overstuffed chair, slid into his favorite position, his legs dangling over one of the arms, his back propped against the other.

  “Now here’s a funny one,” Drake said. “I got this right from headquarters and I’m darned if I know what it means.”

  “Shoot.”

  “You know that the banks these days are quietly keeping a record of all large bills passed out. They don’t say much about it, but when a man asks for big bills the bank keeps a record. Not ostentatiously, of course. For instance, the hundred-dollar bills in a drawer are listed by their serial numbers. A man who wants ten hundred-dollar bills gets the top ten—and after he’s left the bank the cashier makes a note of the top ten numbers on the list, and that’s that. They’ve got a record of who has those particular bills.”

  Mason nodded.

  “Now in that wallet of Hines’s,” Drake went on, “there were twenty-one hundred-dollar bills. I don’t think the police have yet traced the history of all of those bills, and probably they never will, because the bills came from various sources. But the point is that five of them, Perry, came from Orville L. Reedley.”

  “The devil they did!”

  “Uh-huh
.”

  “Well,” Mason commented, “when you stop to figure that angle of it, I guess . . . Say, Paul, let’s check up on this Reedley boy. Let’s find out where he was at the time the murder was committed. After all, you know, he’s supposed to be insanely jealous and—”

  “He’s absolutely in the clear. Police have already checked on him up one side and down the other. He had lunch that day with the local manager at the Interstate outfit. He went back to the office with this manager and was there until around two-thirty, blocking out a strategy by which he hoped to trap his wife. Incidentally, Perry, I think the guy had begun to smell a rat. I think Helen Reedley was having her double put on too good an act. That chaperone business was too good to be true.”

  Mason said, “Well, there must have been some connection between Hines and Reedley.”

  “That’s what the police figure. They’re giving Reedley a shakedown. As soon as they get done, I’ll find out just what they’ve discovered.”

  “But why should Orville Reedley pay money to Hines? There’s only one answer to that, Paul: it must have been because Hines was giving Helen Reedley a double-cross. But there’s no evidence of that. There’s— Wait a minute, Paul, I’ve got it!”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you remember? Reedley’s a gambler. He’s been doing a little gambling, and it was at a poker game that he broached the subject of the detective agency. Well, Hines also is a gambler. Hang it, Paul, Hines must have been sitting in on that poker game when Reedley asked that question. And yet Reedley isn’t supposed to know Hines . . . That money must have changed hands in a poker game and found its way into Hines’s pocket.”

  “How?” Drake asked.

  “Wait a minute,” Mason said. “I’m beginning to get the picture now. That gambler friend of Helen Reedley’s . . .”

  “What about him?”

  “Probably in love with her. Remember that Helen got Hines to rig up the double for her, but she didn’t tell him why. The gambler tipped Helen off to the probability that her husband’s detectives were going to be on the job, but he also wanted to know why. So he probably hired Hines to do a little snooping for him, and the money with which he paid Hines was, ironically enough, money that had been lost to him in a poker game—lost by Orville Reedley!”