Mason, bone tired, entered the offices of the Drake Detective Agency.
“Drake gone home?” he asked the girl at the switchboard.
She shook her head and pointed to the gate leading to a long, narrow corridor. “He’s still in. I think he’s resting. He’s in room seven. There’s a couch in there.”
“I’ll take a peek inside,” Mason said. “If he’s asleep I won’t disturb him. What’s cooking? Anything?”
“He has a lot of operatives out and some reports are coming in, but nothing important. He’s trying to locate this blonde young woman you were so anxious to find. He’s left word to be called if we get anything on her.”
“Thanks,” Mason said. “I’ll tiptoe down. If he’s sleeping I won’t disturb him.”
Mason walked on down the corridor past a veritable rabbit warren of small-sized offices, gently opened the door of number seven.
This was a small office with a table, two straight-backed chairs, and a couch. Paul Drake lay on his back on the couch, snoring gently.
Mason stood for a moment in the doorway, regarding the sleeping figure, then eased out and closed the door.
Just as the door latched shut, the phone on the table shrilled noisily. Mason hesitated a moment, then gently opened the door.
Paul Drake came up to a sitting position on the couch. His eyes were still heavy with sleep as he groped for the telephone, got the receiver to his ear, said, “Hello … yes … What is it? …” He sleep-sodden eyes looked up, saw Mason, and the detective nodded drowsily.
Mason saw Drake’s expression suddenly change. The man galvanized into wakefulness as though he had been hit in the face with a stream of cold water. “Wait a minute,” he said. “What’s that address? … Okay, what’s the name?… Okay … I’ve got it. I’ve got it.”
Drake scribbled rapidly on a pad of paper, then said into the telephone, “Hold everything! Keep watch on the place. If she goes out, shadow her. I’ll be out there right away—fifteen or twenty minutes …. Okay, good-by.”
Drake banged the telephone, said, “We’ve got her, Perry.”
“Who?”
“This Geraldine Corning babe.”
“You’re sure?”
“Her name’s Grace Compton. I have the address here. You had a correct hunch on the initials on the baggage.”
“How’d you locate her, Paul?”
“I’ll tell you after we get started,” Drake said, “Come on. Let’s go.”
Drake ran his fingers through his hair, grabbed a hat, started down the narrow corridor with Mason pounding along at his heels.
“Your car or mine?” Mason asked in the elevator.
“Makes no difference,” Drake told him.
“We’ll take mine,” Mason said. “You do the talking while I’m driving.”
Mason and the detective hurried across the parking lot, jumped into Mason’s car. Drake was talking by the time the car was in motion.
“The location of the car rental agency gave us something to work on,” Drake said. “We started combing the classified ad directory for stores in the neighborhood handling baggage. I’ve had five operatives on the job covering every place they could think of. One of them struck pay dirt. A fellow remembered having sold baggage to a blonde who answered the description and putting the initials G.C. on it. The blonde paid with a check signed ‘Grace Compton,’ and the man remembered the bank. After that it was easy. She’s living in an apartment house, and apparently she’s in at the moment.”
“That’s for us,” Mason said. “Good work, Paul.”
“Of course, it could be a false lead. After all, we’re just working on a description and slender clues. There are lots of blonde babes who buy baggage.”
“I know,” Mason said, “but I have a hunch this is it.”
Drake said, “Turn to the left at the next corner, Perry.”
Mason swung the car around the corner, then, at Drake’s direction, turned back to the right after three blocks.
“Find a parking place in here some place,” Drake said.
Mason eased the car into a vacant place at the curb. He and Drake got out and walked up to the front of a rather ostentatious apartment house.
A man sitting in a parked car near the entrance to the apartment house struck a match, lit a cigarette. Drake said, “That’s my man. Want to talk with him?”
“Do we need to?”
“No. Striking the match and lighting the cigarette means that she’s still in there. That’s his signal to us.”
Mason walked up to the directory, studied the names, and saw that Grace Compton had apartment two-thirty-one.
“How about this door, Paul?” Mason asked, indicating the locked outer door. “Do we sound the buzzer in her apartment, or can you—?”
“That’s easy,” Drake said, looking at the lock on the outer door. He took a key from his pocket, inserted it in the lock. The door swung open.
“Let’s walk,” Mason said.
The climbed the stairs to the second floor, walked back down the corridor and paused before the door bearing the number two-thirty-one.
“It’s your show from here on,” Drake said. “Of course, your hunch may be right and it may be wrong. All we have is a description.”
“We’ll take a chance,” Mason said.
He pressed the bell button. A long, two shorts and a long.
They heard the quick thud of steps on the inside, then the door swung open. A blonde in lounging pajamas said, “My God! You—” She stopped abruptly at the sight of the two men.
“Miss Compton?” Mason asked.
Her eyes instantly became cautious. “What is it?” she asked.
“We just wanted to talk with you,” Mason said.
“Who are you?”
“This is Paul Drake, a detective.”
She said, “You can’t pull that line of stuff with me. I—”
“I’m Perry Mason, a lawyer.”
“Okay, so what?”
Mason said, “Know anything about The Staylonger Motel, Miss Compton?”
“Yes,” she said breathlessly, “I was there. I was there with one of the big-name motion picture stars. He didn’t want the affair revealed. He just swept me off my feet. Now I’m suing him for support of my unborn child. How did you know?”
Mason said, “Were you there with Mr. Stewart G. Bedford yesterday?”
Her eyes narrowed. “All right, if this is a pinch, get it off your chest. If it isn’t, get out of here.”
“It’s not a pinch. I’m trying to get information before the police do.”
“So you brought a detective along with you?”
“Private.”
“Oh, I see. And you want to know just what I did yesterday. How perfectly delightful! Would you like to come in and sit down? I suppose you expect me to buy you a drink and—”
“You knew Binney Denham?”
“Denham? Denham?” she said and slowly shook her head. “The name means nothing to me. Am I supposed to know him?”
“If you’re the one I think you are,” Mason said, “you and Stewart Bedford occupied units fifteen and sixteen in The Staylonger Motel yesterday.”
“Why, Mr. Mason, how you talk?” she said. “I never go to a motel without a chaperon … never!”
“And,” Mason went on, “Binney Denham was found sprawled out stone dead in the unit you had been occupying. A .38 revolver had sent a bullet through his—”
She stepped back, her face white, her eyes wide and round. Her lips opened as though she might be going to scream. She pressed her knuckles up against her lips, hard.
Mason nodded to Paul Drake, calmly pushed his way into the apartment, closing the door behind him. He moved over to a chair, sat down, lit a cigarette, and said, “Sit down, Paul,” acting as though he might have owned the apartment.
The girl looked at him for several long seconds, terror in her eyes.
At length she asked, “Is this … is this on the up and up?”
“Ring up the police,” Mason said. “They’ll tell you.”
“What do I want with the police?”
“It’s probably the other way around at that,” Mason told her. “They’ll be here any minute. Want to tell us what happened?”
She moved over to a chair, eased down to sit on the extreme edge.
“Any time,” Mason said.
“What’s your interest in it, Mr. Mason?”
“I’m representing Stewart Bedford. Police seem to think he might have had something to do with the murder.”
“Gosh!” she said in a hushed voice. “He could have at that!”
“What happened?” Mason asked.
She said, “It was a shakedown. I don’t know the details. Binney has hired me on several occasions to do jobs for him.”
“What sort of jobs?”
“Keep the sucker out of circulation until Binney has the cash all in hand. Then Binney gives me a signal and I turn him loose.”
“Why keep him out of circulation?” Mason asked.
“So he won’t change this mind at the last minute and so we can be certain he isn’t working with any firm of private detectives.”
“What do you do?”
“I keep their minds on other things.”
“Such as what?”
“Am I supposed to draw diagrams?”
“What did you do with Bedford?”
“I kept his mind on other things … and it was a job. He’s in love with his wife. I tried to get him interested, and I might as well have been an ice cube on the drain-board of the kitchen sink. Then after a while we really did get friendly, and—Don’t make any mistake about it. That’s all it was. Just a good, decent friendship. I like the guy.
“I made up my mind then and there that that was to be my last play in the sucker racket. When I saw the way he felt about his wife, the way he … well, I’m young yet. There’s still a chance. Maybe some man will feel that way about me some day if he meets me in the right way. He’s never going to feel that way about me the way things are now.”
“That,” she said, “is where somebody gave us both a double cross.”
“What happened?”
“I went out. I left a bottle of liquor on the table. Somebody must have doped the liquor. We came back and had a drink. I didn’t even know I was drugged until I woke up sometime after dark. Bedford was still sleeping. I’d given him about twice as much whisky as I took. I felt his pulse. It was strong and regular, so I figured there hadn’t been any harm done. I thought for a while it might have been knockout drops, and those can be dangerous. I guess this was one of the barbiturates. It didn’t seem to hurt anything.”
“And then what?”
She said, “I took a shower and got dressed and put on some other clothes. I knew that it wouldn’t be very long. The banks had closed and Binney should be showing up any minute.”
“And he did?”
“He did.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Told me that everything was clear and we could leave.”
“Then what happened?”
“Then I accused him of drugging the drink, and he denied it. I got a little hot under the collar. I thought he didn’t trust me any more. I was mad anyway. I told him that the next time he had a deal he could just get some other girl to do the job for him. One thing led to another. I told him Bedford was asleep. We tried to wake him up. We couldn’t wake him. He’d get up—to a sitting position—and then lurch back to the pillows. He was limber-legged.
“Okay, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. He was just going to have to sleep it off. I was mad at Binney, but that wasn’t putting any starch in Bedford’s legs.
“I wasn’t going to stick around there. He had money. He could get a cab and get home. I pinned a note on his sleeve, saying things were all right, that he could leave any time. Then I went out to my car.”
“Where was Binney Denham?”
“Denham was in his car.”
“Then what did you do?”
“I drove back and turned the car in at the rental agency the way I was supposed to. On a deal of that sort I’m not supposed to try and get anything back on the deposit. I just park the car in the lot with the keys in it, walk toward the office as though I’m going to check in, and then just keep on going. They find the car parked, with the keys in it. There’s a fifty-buck deposit on the thing and only eleven or twelve dollars due. They wait a while to see if anyone’s coming back for the credit and then, after a while, some clerk clears the records, puts the surplus in his pocket and that’s all there is to it.”
“Did you leave Binney behind?”
“No, he pulled out about the same time I did.”
“Then he must have turned around and gone back.”
“I guess so. Was his car there?”
Mason shook his head. “Apparently not. What kind of a car?”
“A nondescript Chevy,” she said. “He wants a car that nobody can describe, a car that looks so much like all the other cars on the road nobody pays any attention to it.”
“Was there any reason for him to have gone back?”
“Not that I know of. He had the money.”
“Was there anything he wanted to see Bedford about?”
“Not that I know. He had the dough. What else would he have wanted?”
Mason frowned. “It must have been something. He went back to see Bedford for some reason. He couldn’t have left something behind, could he—something incriminating?”
“Not Binney.”
“Do you know what the shakedown was?”
“Binney never tells me.”
“What name did you give?”
“Geraldine Corning. That’s my professional name.”
“Planning on taking a trip?” Mason asked, indicating the new baggage by the closet door.
“I could be.”
“Make enough out of this sort of stuff to pay?”
She said bitterly, “If I made a hundred times as much, it wouldn’t pay. What’s a person’s self-respect worth?”
“Then you can’t help Bedford at all?” Mason asked.
“I can’t help him, and I can’t hurt him. He paid, and paid up like a gentleman. It was quite a shakedown this time—twenty thousand bucks. All in traveler’s checks.”
“What did you do with them?”
“I got him to sign them and I put them out in the glove compartment of the rented car. That was what we had agreed to do. Binney was hanging around there some place where he could see.
“We’d made arrangements so that we were sure we were safe. We knew we couldn’t be followed. We just cruised around until we were dead certain of that. I doubled and twisted and Binney followed until we knew no one was tailing us. Then I let Bedford pick whatever motel he wanted. That gave him confidence, relaxed him.
“I locked him in so he couldn’t get out, went to the phone booth, called Binney, told him where I was and told him the mark had signed the traveler’s checks.”
“Then what?”
“Then I left them in the glove compartment of the rented car. That was the procedure we’d agreed on. Binney took the checks out and got them cashed.”
“Do you have any idea how he went about doing it?”
She shook her head. “Probably he has a stand-in with a banker friend somewhere. I don’t know. I don’t think he put them into circulation as regular checks. He just handled the deal his own way.”
“How about Binney? Did he have an accomplice?”
She shook her head.
“He referred to a man he called Delbert.”
She laughed. “Binney was the smooth one! Suckers would get so infuriated at this fictitious Delbert they could kill him with their bare hands, but they always had a certain sympathy for Binney. He was always so sweet and so apologetic.”
“You were his only partner?”
“Don’t be silly! I wasn’t a partner. I was a paid employee. Sometimes he’d give me a couple of hundred extra, but not often. Binney was a one-way street on money. Getting dough out of that little double-crosser was—”
“Yes, go on,” Mason prompted as her voice died down.
She shook her head.
“He double-crossed you?”
“Go get lost, will you? Why should I sit here and blab all I know. Me and my big mouth!”
Mason tried another line of approach.
“So you made up your mind it was your last case?”
“After talking with Bedford I did.”
“How did that happen? What did Bedford say to you?”
“Damned if I know. I guess he really didn’t say anything. It was the way he felt about his wife, the way he’d look right past me. He was so much in love with his wife he couldn’t see any other woman. I got to wondering how a woman would go about getting the respect of a man like that … hell! I don’t know what happened. Just put it down that I got religion, if you want to put a price tag on everything.”
Mason said, “We only have your word for it. It was a sweet opportunity for a double cross. You yourself admit you had decided to quit the racket. You could have told Binney you were quitting. Binney might not have liked that. You admit you and Binney were in there working with Bedford, trying to get him to wake up. You had undoubtedly gone through Bedford’s brief case and knew what was in it. When the party got rough you could have pumped a shot into Binney’s back, gone through him to the tune of twenty thousand dollars, and simply driven away.”
She said, “That’s your nasty legal mind. You lawyers do think of the damnedest things.”
“Anything wrong with the idea?”
“Everything’s wrong with it.”
“Such as what?”
“I told you I was quitting. I told you I’d got religion. Would I get moral and decide to quit a racket and then plan on bumping a guy off to get twenty grand? That’d be a hell of a way to get religion!”
“Perhaps you had to kill him,” Mason said, watching her with narrow eyes. “Binney may not have liked the idea of your getting religion. He may have had ideas of his own. The party may have got rough.”
She said, “You’re bound to make me the fall guy, win, lose, or draw, aren’t you? You’re a lawyer. Your client has money, social position, political prestige. I have nothing. You’ll throw me to the wolves to save your client. I’m a damn fool even to talk with you.”
Mason said, “If you killed him in self-defense, I feel certain Mr. Bedford would see that you—”
“Get lost,” she interrupted.
Mason got to his feet “I just wanted to get your story.”
“You’ve had it.”
“If anything happened and you did have to act in self-defense, it would strengthen your case if you reported the facts to the police. You should also know that any evidence of flight can be construed as an admission of guilt.”
She said sarcastically, “You’ve probably got a lot of things on your mind, Mr. Mason. I’ve got a lot of things on my mind now. I’m not going to detain you any longer and I’m not going to let you detain me.”
She got up and walked to the door.
The two men walked slowly back down the stairs. “Have your operative keep her shadowed, Paul,” Mason said. “I have a hunch she’s planning on making a break for it.”
“Want to try and stop her if she does?”
“Gosh no! I only want to find out where she goes.”
“That might be difficult.”
“See that your operative has money,” Mason said. “Let him get on the same plane that she takes. Go wherever she goes.”
“Okay,” Drake said. “You go get in the car. I’ll talk with my operative.”
Mason walked over to his car. Drake walked past the parked automobile, jerked his head slightly, then walked on around the corner.
The man got out of the parked automobile, walked to the corner, overtook Drake, had a few minutes’ brief conversation, then turned back to the car.
Drake came over to Mason and said, “He’ll let us know anything that happens and he’ll follow her wherever she goes; only the guy doesn’t have a passport.”
“That’s all right,” Mason said. “She won’t have one either. Your man has enough money to cover expenses?”
“He has now,” Drake said.
“We have to be certain she doesn’t know she’s being shadowed, Paul.”
“This man’s good. You want her to run, Perry?”
Mason said, somewhat musingly, “I wish she didn’t give that impression of sincerity, Paul. Sure I want her to run. I’m representing a client who is accused of murder. According to her own story this girl had every reason to kill Binney Denham. Now if she resorts to flight I can accuse her of being the killer, unless the police find more evidence against Bedford. Therefore, I want her to have lots of rope so she can hang herself … but somehow she bothers me. The story she tells arouses my sympathy.”
“Don’t start getting soft, Perry. She’s a professional con woman. It’s her business to make a sob-sister story sound reasonable. It’s my guess she killed Denham. Don’t shed any tears over her.”
“I won’t shed any tears,” Mason said. “And if she dusts out of here in a hurry I’ve just about got a verdict of not guilty in the bag for Stewart G. Bedford.”