At one o’clock in the morning Paul Drake tapped his code knock on the hall door of Mason’s private office.
Della Street let him in.
Paul Drake walked over to the client’s big, overstuffed chair, slid into his favorite position with his knees over the arms and said, “I’m going to be in the office from now on, Perry. I’ve got men out working on all the angles. I thought you’d like to get the dope.”
“Shoot,” Mason said.
“First on the victim. His name is Binney Denham. No one seems to know what he does. He had a safe-deposit box in an all-night-and-day bank. The safe-deposit box was in joint tenancy with a fellow by the name of Harry Elston. At nine forty-five last night Elston showed up at the bank and went to the box. He was carrying a brief case with him. Nobody knows whether he put in or took out. Police have now sealed up the box. An inheritance tax appraiser is going to be on hand first thing in the morning and they’ll open it up. Bet it’ll be empty.”
Mason nodded.
“Aside from that, you can’t find out a thing. Denham has no bank account, left no trail in the financial world, yet he lived well, spent a reasonable amount of money, all in cash.
“Police are going to check and see if he made income-tax returns as soon as things open up in the morning.
“Now, in regard to that car. It was a drive-yourself car. I tried to get it, but police already had the license number. They telephoned in and the car is impounded.”
“Who rented it, Paul?”
“A nondescript person with an Oklahoma driving license. The driving license data was on the rental contract. The police have checked and it doesn’t mean a damned thing. Fictitious name. Fictitious address.”
“Man or woman?”
“Mousy little man. No one seems to remember much about him.”
“What else?”
“Down at the motor court, police have some pretty good description stuff. It seems that the two units were occupied by a man and a babe. The man claimed he was expecting another couple. They got a double unit, connecting door. The man registered; the girl sat in the car. The manager didn’t get a very good look, but had the impression she was a blonde, with good skin, swell figure, and that indefinable something that marks the babe, the chick, the moll. The man looked just a little bit frightened. Businessman type. Got a good description of him.”
“Fifty to fifty-four. Gray suit Height five feet nine. Weight about a hundred and ninety or a hundred and ninety-five. Gray eyes. Rather long, straight nose. Mouth rather wide and determined. Wore a gray hat, but seemed to have plenty of hair, which wasn’t white except a very slight bit of gray at the temples.”
Elsa Griffin flashed Mason a startled glance at the accuracy of the description.
Mason’s poker face warned her to silence.
“Anything else, Paul?” the lawyer asked.
“Yes. A girl showed up and rented unit number twleve—rather an attractive girl, dark, slender, quiet, thirty to thirty-five.”
“Go ahead,” Mason said.
“She registered; was in and out, is now out and hasn’t returned as yet.”
“How does she enter into the picture?” Mason asked.
“She’s okay,” Drake said. “But the manager says he caught a woman prowling her place—a woman about thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two. A swell-looker, striking figure, one of the long-legged, queenly sort; dark hair, gray eyes. She was prowling this unit twelve. The manager caught her coming out She wasn’t registered at the place and he wanted to know what she was doing. She told him she was supposed to meet her friend there, that the friend wasn’t in; the door was unlocked, so she had gone in, sat down and waited for nearly an hour.”
“Have any car?” Mason asked.
“That’s the suspicious part of it. She must have parked her car a block or two away and walked back. She was on foot, but there’s no bus line nearer than half a mile to the place, and this gal was all dolled up—high heels and everything.”
“And she was prowling unit number twelve?”
“Yes, that’s the only suspicious thing the manager noticed. It was around eight o’clock. The woman in unit twelve had just checked in two hours or so earlier, then had driven out.
“The manager took this other woman—the prowler—at face value; didn’t think anything more about it. But when the police asked him to recall anything at all that was out of the ordinary, he recalled her.
“Police don’t attach any significance to her … as yet anyway.
“The manager remembered seeing the yellow car go out somewhere around eight o’clock, he thinks it was, and, while he can’t be positive, ifs his impression the blonde girl was driving the car and no one else was in the car with her. That gave the police an idea that she might have left before the shooting took place. They can’t be certain about the time of the shooting.”
“It was a shooting?” Mason asked.
“That’s right One shot from a .38 caliber revolver. The guy was shot in the back. The bullet went through the heart and he died almost instantly.”
“How do they know it was fired from the back?” Mason asked. “They haven’t had an autopsy yet.”
“They found the bullet,” Drake said. “It went entirely through the body and failed to penetrate the front of the coat. The bullet rolled out when they moved the body. That happens a lot more frequently than you’d suppose. The powder charge in a .38 caliber cartridge is just about sufficient to take the bullet through a body, and if the clothes furnish resistance the bullet will be trapped.”
“Then they have the fatal bullet?”
“That’s right.”
“What sort of shape is it in, do you know, Paul? Is it flattened out pretty bad, or is it—”
“No, it’s in pretty good shape, as I understand it. The police are confident that there are enough individual markings so they can identify the gun if and when they find it.
“Now, let me go on, Perry. They got the idea that if the blonde took out alone it might have been because this man Denham showed up and he was having an argument with her boy friend. He used the name of S. G. Wilfred when he registered and gave a San Diego address. The address is phony and the name seems to be fictitious.”
“Okay, go ahead. What happened?”
“Well, the police got the idea that if this man, whom we’ll call Wilfred, had popped Denham in a fight over the gal and then was left without a car there at the motel, he might have tried to sneak out the back way. So they started looking for tracks, and sure enough, they found where he had gone through a barbed wire fence and evidently snagged his clothes. The police got a few clothing fibers from the barbed wire where he went through—that was clever work. Your friend, Lieutenant Tragg, was on the job, and as soon as he saw the tracks going through the barbed wire he started using a magnifying glass. Sure enough, he caught some fibers on the barbed wire.”
“What about the tracks?” Mason asked.
“They’ve having a moulage made of the footprints. They followed the tracks through the wire, across a field and out to a side road. They have an idea the man probably walked down to the main highway and hitchhiked his way into town. The police will be broadcasting an appeal in the newspapers, asking for anyone who noticed a hitchhiker to give a description.”
“I see,” Mason said thoughtfully. “What else, Paul?”
“Well, that car was returned to the rental agency. A young woman put the car in the agency parking lot, started toward the office and then seems to have disappeared. Of course, you know how these things go. The person who rents the car puts up a fifty-dollar deposit, and the car rental people don’t worry about cars that are brought in. Its up to the renter to check in at the office in order to get the deposit back. The rental and mileage on a daily basis don’t ordinarily run up to fifty bucks.”
“The police have taken charge of the car?”
“That’s right. They’ve had a fingerprint man on it, and I understand there are some pretty good fingerprints. Of course, they’re fingerprinting units fifteen and sixteen down there at the motel.”
“Well,” Mason said, “they’ll probably have something pretty definite then.”
“Hell! They’ve got something pretty definite right now,” Drake said. “The only thing they haven’t got is the man who matches the fingerprints. But don’t overlook any bets on that. They’ll have him, Perry.”
“When?”
Drake lowered his eyes in thoughtful contemplation of the problem. “Even money they have him by ten o’clock in the morning,” he said, “and I’d give you big odds they have him by five o’clock in the afternoon.”
“What are you going to do now?” Mason asked.
“I have a couch in one of the offices. I’m going to get a little shut-eye. I’ve got operatives crawling all over the place, picking up all the leads they can.”
“Okay,” Mason said. “If anything happens, get in touch with me.”
“Where will you be?”
“Right here.”
Drake said, “You must have one hell of an important client in this case.”
“Don’t do any speculating,” Mason told him. “Just keep information coming in.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Drake told him and walked out.
Mason turned to Elsa Griffin. “Apparently,” he said, “no one has attached the slightest suspicion to you.”
“That was a very good description of the occupant of unit twelve,” she said.
“Want to go back?” Mason asked.
There was a sudden, swift alarm in her face.
“Go back? What for?”
Mason said, “As you know, Bedford told me about your help in getting the fingerprints off that silver platter. How would you like to go back down to the motel, drive in to your place at unit twelve. The manager will probably come over to see if you’re all right. You can give him a song and dance, then take a fingerprint outfit and go to work on the doorknobs, on the drawers in the dresser, any place where someone would be apt to have left fingerprints. Lift those fingerprints with tape and bring them back to me.”
“But suppose … suppose the manager is suspicious. Suppose he rechecks my license number. I juggled the figures when I gave him the license number of the car when I registered.”
“That,” Mason said, “is a chance well have to take.”
She shook her head. “That wouldn’t be fair to Mr. Bedford. If anybody identified me, the trail would lead directly to him.”
“There are too damn many trails leading directly to him the way it is,” Mason told her. “Paul Drake was right It’s even money they’ll have him by ten o’clock in the morning. In any event, they’ll have him by five o’clock in the afternoon. He left two hundred traveler’s checks scattered around, and Binney Denham was getting the money on those checks. Police will start backtracking Denham during the day. They’ll find out where some of those checks were cashed. Then the trail will lead directly to Bedford. They’ll match his fingerprints.”
“And then what?” she asked.
“Then,” Mason told her, “we have a murder case to try. Then we go to court.”
“And then what?”
“Then they have to prove him guilty beyond all reasonable doubt. Do you think he killed Denham?”
“No!” she said with sudden vehemence.
“All right,” Mason said, “he has his story. He has the note that was pinned to his sleeve, the note he found when he woke up saying he could leave.”
“But what reason does he give for not reporting the body?”
“He did report the body,” Mason said. “You reported it. He told you to telephone the police. He did everything he could to start the police on their investigation, but he just tried to keep his name out of it. It was an ill-advised attempt to avoid publicity because he was dealing with a blackmailer.”
She thought it over for a while and said, “Mr. Bedford isn’t going to like that.”
“What isn’t he going to like about it?”
“Having to explain to the police why he was down there.”
“He doesn’t have to explain anything,” Mason said. “He can keep silent. I’ll do the talking.”
“I’m afraid he won’t like that either.”
Mason said impatiently, “There’s going to be a lot about this he won’t like before he gets done. Persons who are accused of murder seldom like the things the police do in connection with developing the case.”
“He’ll be accused of murder?”
“Can you think of any good reason why he won’t?”
“You think I can do some real good by going down and looking for fingerprints?”
Mason said, “It’s a gamble. From what Drake tells me, you’re apparently not involved in any way. The manager of the motel won’t want to have his guests annoyed. He’ll keep the trouble centralized in cabins fifteen and sixteen as far as possible. You have a cocktail and spill a little on a scarf you’ll have around your neck so it will be obvious you’ve been drinking. Go into the motel just as though nothing had happened. If the manager comes over to you about a prowler in your cabin, tell him the woman was perfectly all right, that she was a friend of yours who was coming to visit you, that you told her to go in and wait in case you weren’t there, that you got tied up on a date with someone you liked very much and had to stand her up.
“I’d like to have the fingerprints of whoever it was that was in that cabin, but what I’d mainly like is to have you remove all of your fingerprints. After you get done developing latent prints and lifting any that you find, take some soap and warm water and scrub the place all to pieces. Get rid of anything incriminating.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because,” Mason said, “if later on the police get the idea that there’s something funny about the occupant of unit number twelve and start looking for fingerprints, they won’t find yours.
“Don’t you see the thing that’s going to attract suspicion to you above all else is not going back there tonight? If your cabin isn’t occupied, the manager will report that as another suspicious circumstance to the police.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’m on my way. Where do I get the fingerprint outfit?”
Mason grinned. “We keep one here for emergencies. You know how to lift fingerprints all right. Bedford said you did it from that cocktail tray.”
“I know how,” she said. “Believe it or not, I took a correspondence course as a detective. I’m on my way.”
“If anything happens,” Mason warned, “anything at all, call Paul Drake’s agency. I’ll be in constant touch with Paul Drake. If anyone should start questioning you, dry up like a clam.”
“On my way,” she told him.