Эрл Гарднер - The Case of the Lucky Legs

"I know all about the story you told the officers," Paul Drake said.

"Well," Mason told him, "what else would there be?"

Drake shrugged his shoulders.

"How should I know?" he asked.

"Well," the lawyer said, "if you know my story, that's all there is to it."

"It's a good story," Paul Drake said, and then added after a moment, "except for one thing."

"What's the one thing?" Mason wanted to know.

"I'll tell you the facts," Drake told him, "and then you can put two and two together."

"Go ahead," said the lawyer curtly.

Paul Drake squirmed about in the big leather chair so that his long legs were swung over the arm of the chair. The opposite chair arm braced the small of his back.

"Hat, gloves and cane on the table in the livingroom. Those were Patton's. A woman—the one you met, by the way—whose name happens to be Sarah Fieldman, occupying the opposite apartment, heard a girl having hysterics; figured the sounds must have come from the bathroom; thinks the girl was locked in the bathroom and perhaps some man was trying to get in. The body was lying in the bedroom, clad in underclothes, a bathrobe thrown over one shoulder, one arm through the sleeve, the other arm not in the sleeve; death almost instantaneous; a single stabbing puncture with a large bread knife. The knife was new. The wound was directly over the heart. It was a messy murder, a lot of blood spurting around; the doors both locked, the door from the bedroom bolted on the inside. An open window leading to a fire escape; marks on the bed indicating a man might have gone across the bed and out on the fire escape, or might have climbed in through the fire escape.

"In the bathroom, the police find a girl's handkerchief, all wet as though it had been used as a wash rag, or had been dropped in blood and then an attempt made to wash it out. There was bloody water spattered around the sides of the wash bowl. It had been a hasty job. Looks as though some woman had tried to clean the blood on her clothes, or herself, without much success. In the outer room, the police found a blackjack."

"Wait a minute," Mason interrupted. "You say the knife was a new knife. How could the police tell that?"

"Evidences of a chalk price mark on the blade. Also, the knife was brought to the apartment wrapped in paper. Apparently the wrapping paper is the same paper that was wrapped around the knife when it was purchased. The police have some fingerprints on the paper. They're not so good—mostly smudged. Knobs of the doors on the inside contain no fingerprints. Looks as though some one had wiped them off. The outer knob has too many prints to be of any value—the police, Mrs. Fieldman, perhaps yours, and lots of others."

"Any suspects?" asked Perry Mason.

"How do you mean?"

"Any one seen leaving the apartment?" asked the lawyer.

Paul Drake looked at him with that expression of droll humor on his face, his eyes glassy and utterly without expression.

"What makes you ask that?" he inquired.

"Just a routine question," Perry Mason told him.

"The officer on the beat," said Paul Drake, "reported a woman who acted suspiciously. There were a couple of telephone messages from women on the table. The police would have attached more importance to those, if it hadn't been for one thing."

"What was the one thing?" the lawyer inquired.

"Your friend, Dr. Doray," the detective said. "His car was parked out in front of the place at the time of the murder. That is, it was parked within half a block of the place."

"How do the police know?"

"It was parked in front of a fire plug. The traffic officer tagged the car. He noticed that it came from Cloverdale. When the report of the murder went in to the homicide squad, they got in touch with the district attorney's office, and some bright boy in the district attorney's office remembered that Carl Manchester had been working on a case involving a man named Patton. They got hold of Manchester, found out it was the same chap, found out that you were interested in it, that Bradbury was interested in it, and that a Dr. Doray was interested in it."

"Why didn't they go after Bradbury?" Mason asked.

"Because they got such a live lead on Doray. They happened to check up with the officer who had tagged Doray's car."

Perry Mason squinted his eyes thoughtfully.

"Anything else?" he asked.

"Now," said Paul Drake, "I'm coming to the thing that makes your story look a little funny."

"What is it?"

"The Holliday Apartments," the detective said, "tries to encourage its tenants to turn their keys in at the desk when they go out. For that reason, they have a great big tag that's chained to the key. It has a lot of stuff printed on it about dropping the whole thing into the mail box, with a stamp on it, when it is inadvertently carried away."

"Yes, I know the type," Mason said.

"The police found the key to Frank Patton's apartment in the side pocket of his coat," Drake went on. "Patton had evidently opened the door, then dropped the key into the side pocket of his coat. Perhaps he'd locked the door from the inside; perhaps he hadn't. The theory of the police is that he hadn't. They reason that if he'd locked the door from the inside, he'd have left the key in the lock. They think that he had an appointment with some woman. Perhaps with two women. That he left the door open because he wanted the women to walk in."

"Then," Mason said, "who do the police figure locked the door?"

Paul Drake's glassy eyes regarded Mason without expression; his face remained twisted into that frozen expression of droll humor which was so characteristic of the man.

"The police figure," he said, "that the murderer locked the door when he went out."

"The murderer," said Perry Mason, "might have climbed in by the fire escape and gone out the same way."

"Then who locked the door?" asked Drake.

"Frank Patton," Mason said.

"Then, why didn't he leave the key hanging in the door from the inside?"

"Because he mechanically put it in his pocket."

Paul Drake shrugged his shoulders.

"Sure, that's reasonable," Perry Mason said. "A man frequently locks the door from the inside and drops the key in his pocket."

"You don't need to argue with me," the detective told him. "You can save the argument for a jury. I'm just telling you, that's all."

"How long after the sound of the body falling on the floor before the officer arrived?" Mason asked.

"Perhaps ten minutes," the detective told him. "The woman got up, put on some clothes, went down in the elevator, found the officer, told him her story, convinced him it was something he should look into, and brought him back to the apartment. Then there was the little while that they were talking with you, and then the officer got a key. Make it perhaps fifteen minutes in all; say ten minutes up to the time you first saw the officer in the corridor."

"A person can do a lot in ten minutes," Mason said.

"Not much in the line of cleaning up blood stains. It would mean a pretty hurried job," Paul Drake commented.

"Do the police," asked Perry Mason, "know Bradbury's address?"

"I don't think the police are going to figure Bradbury very heavy one way or another," Drake said. "They don't know where he's staying, but of course they can find out easily enough by making a check of the hotels. Carl Manchester simply knows that he can be reached through you."

"And," Perry Mason said, "I managed to hold him in the background until Doray's name had come in first. I want the newspapers to get the young love angle rather than the sugar daddy viewpoint."

The detective nodded.

The telephone on Perry Mason's desk rang steadily Mason frowned at it.

"Any one know you're here?" he asked, looking at Paul Drake.

The detective shook his head.