Эрл Гарднер - The Case of the Curious Bride

The detective nodded lugubriously. Della Street 's face was serious. Perry Mason looked from one to the other.

"Go ahead," he said, "spill it."

"The district attorney," Drake said, "has evidently got a regular professional publicity man on the job."

"Why?"

"Because every morning he keeps releasing something dramatic against your client."

Mason said tonelessly, "He'll run out of facts one of these mornings. What is it this time?"

"He's going to exhume the body of the man who was buried under the name Gregory Lorton. He intimated he expects to find poison. He keeps harping back to the fact that Rhoda Montaine was a nurse; that she put Ipral in her husband's chocolate when she wanted him to sleep soundly; that if she wanted him to sleep just a little more soundly, it would have been an easy matter for her to have put in a deadly poison."

The lines of Mason's face became harsh. "They're afraid they won't be able to use the testimony of the husband in court, so they're spreading this Ipral business all over the newspapers.

"There's no question they're using a deliberate campaign of adverse newspaper publicity. They're trying to slap me in the face with the front page of a newspaper every morning."

"Anything you can do about it?" asked Paul Drake.

Mason narrowed his lips and said, "A lot I can do about it. If he wants to give that girl a fair trial, that's one thing. If he wants to try the case in the newspapers and try to prejudice the public against her, that's another thing."

"Watch your step, chief," Della Street warned; "the district attorney may be trying to get you to do something desperate."

Perry Mason's slow grin held grim portent. "I've fought the devil with fire before this, and haven't had my fingers burnt."

"You've had your hair singed a couple of times," Drake pointed out. "When you start pulling fast ones, you can take more chances than any one I ever knew."

A twinkle came to the lawyer's eyes. "Well," he said, "I'll promise you both something."

"What is it?"

"You haven't seen anything yet."

"You mean you're going to pull a fast one in this case?" Della Street asked, her eyes dark with concern.

"So fast," Mason said, "that it's going to whiz over the home plate before any one knows whether it's a strike or a ball."

"What good's it going to do if the umpire can't call it?" Drake inquired, the droll humor of his face more emphasized than ever.

"Perhaps," said Perry Mason softly, "it's not anything that I want called by the umpire. I may be aiming at the man who's doing the batting… Come on in, Paul."

The two men seated themselves in Mason's private office. Drake pulled a notebook from his pocket.

"Got something, Paul?"

"I think so."

"What is it?"

"You told me to check back on Moxley and find out everything he'd been doing, as nearly as I could."

"Yes."

"It wasn't easy. Moxley did time. He got out of jail broke. He needed money pretty badly. He was a lone wolf, so it's pretty hard to tell all that he did, but I've got a line on something that he did, that is, I think he did it."

"Go ahead," the lawyer said.

"We found out Moxley put through a long distance call to Centerville. We also discovered his trunk had a label from the Palace Hotel in Centerville. We checked the records of the Palace Hotel and couldn't find where Moxley had ever been registered there. However, there's one peculiar thing about his record. He'd keep changing his last name, but he'd nearly always keep his first name as Gregory. He probably did that so when people called him by his first name, he didn't have to watch his step to remember an alias. Anyhow, we went back over the records of the Palace Hotel, and found that a Gregory Freeman had been registered there for something over two months. So we took a look through the marriage licenses and found out that a man named Gregory Freeman had married a girl by the name of Doris Pender.

"We looked up the Pender woman and found that she'd been employed as a stenographer and bookkeeper in a creamery, there at Centerville. She was a steady, industrious worker and had saved up a little money that she'd put in stocks and bonds. Then she got married, gave up her job and moved away with her husband. Apparently, she didn't have any relatives there in Centerville, although the people at the creamery thought she had a brother some place in the northern part of the state."

Mason's eyes glittered with concentration. He nodded his head thoughtfully. "Good work, Paul," he said.

"So," the detective went on, "we checked through the meter connections of the electric light company, just on a chance that Gregory Moxley and this Pender woman might have lived here under the name of Gregory Freeman. We didn't find any connections under that name, but we did find a meter connection about two weeks ago under the name of Doris Freeman at the Balboa Apartments, at seven twentyone West Ordway. She's got apartment 609. She's living there by herself. No one seems to know a thing about her."

"Perhaps," said the lawyer, "we can trace some telephone calls through the apartment switchboard, and…"

The detective grinned. "Listen," he said, "what do you think us guys do to earn our money?"

"Oh," Mason said pointedly, "do you earn it?"

"Wait until I finish and you'll say we do," Drake said. "I haven't told you anything yet."

"Go ahead then and tell me something."

"We found there was a switchboard in the lobby. There's some one on duty in the lobby all the time. The switchboard isn't particularly busy. They keep a record of calls that are made and the number of the apartment from which the calls come.

"We were afraid to try and pump the person who had the records, so we arranged to decoy him away from the desk for a few minutes, and one of my operatives slipped in and took a look in the book that lists the telephone records.

"These records aren't kept on an hourly basis—just by the date on which the calls are put through—but we found that this apartment was charged with a call to South ninefourthreesixtwo on the sixteenth day of June, and that call was the first call in the book under date of June 16th, so it must have been made shortly after midnight."

"Where's the book?" asked the lawyer.

"Out there. But we got a photograph of the page that shows the call. That will keep them from doctoring the book, in case we want to bring it into court."

Mason nodded thoughtfully. "Good work," he said. "We may want to bring that book into court—and then, again, we may not. Have you got a good man that we can put on the job? One who's dependable, Paul?"

"Sure. I've got Danny Spear. He's the one who took the photograph."

"Is he good?"

"I'll say he is, one of the best in the business. You should remember him, Perry. We used him in that hatchet murder case."

Mason nodded. "Let's get him," he said, "and go on out there."

"To the Balboa Apartments?"

"Yes."

Drake picked up his hat. "Let's go," he said.

Paul Drake slowed his light car and swung in close to the curb. Danny Spear, a nondescript individual, with a flatcrowned brown hat tilted back to show rusty brown locks straggling out from under the sweat band, glanced inquiringly at Perry Mason.

Spear would never have been taken for a detective. There was something wideeyed and innocent about him that made him appear to be a typical «rube» pausing in front of a shell game at a country fair. His face habitually wore the pleased grin of a yokel who is seeing the world for the first time. "What do I do?" he asked.

"You trail us into the apartment house," Mason told him. "We'll go in the jane's apartment and buzz the door. If she opens the door to let us in, you walk on past as though you were going to some apartment down at the end of the corridor. But you time things so that you get a look at her face as you walk past the door. It'll only be a quick glimpse, but you can get a flash of her face so you can spot her later on. Now, it's important that you get her fixed in your mind. If you don't get enough of a look to recognize her, you'd better wait until we get in and then come and knock at the door and put up some kind of a stall about knowing the jane that used to live in the apartment, or something of that sort. If you do get a good look at her, take a divorce from us and tail her if she goes out. We'll leave you with the car. When Drake and I leave the place, we'll call a cab. You can be sitting in the car. Do you get that straight?"