Erie Gardner - The Case of the Crying Swallow

Mason waited until he saw Major Winnett leave the house, walking toward the stables. Then the lawyer quietly opened the door of his room, walked down the corridor to Winnett’s bedroom, crossed the balcony and climbed to the rail.

The entrance to the swallow’s nest was too small to accommodate the lawyer’s hand, but he enlarged it by clipping away bits of the dried mud with his thumb and forefinger.

From inside the nest came faint rustlings of motion. An immature beak pushed against Mason’s finger.

The parent swallows cried protests as they swooped in swift, stabbing circles around the lawyer’s head, but Mason, working rapidly, enlarged the opening so he could insert his hand into the nest. He felt soft down-covered bodies. Down below them, his groping fingers encountered only the concave surface of the nest.

A frown of annoyance crossed the lawyer’s face. He continued groping, however, gently moving the young birds to one side. Then the frown faded as the tips of his fingers struck a hard metallic object.

As the lawyer managed to remove this object, sunlight scintillated an emerald and diamond brooch into brilliance.

Mason swiftly pocketed the bit of jewelry and drew back from the fierce rushes of the swallows. He dropped to the floor of the balcony and returned to the bedroom.

Back in the bedroom, he made a swift, thorough search of the various places where small objects might be concealed. A sole leather gun case in the back of a closet contained an expensive shotgun. Mason looked through the barrels. Both were plugged with oiled rags at breech and muzzle.

Mason’s knife extracted one of the rags. He tilted up the barrels, and jewelry cascaded out into his palm, rings, earrings, brooches, a diamond and emerald necklace.

Mason replaced the jewelry, inserted the rag once more and put the gun back in the leather case, then returned the case to the closet.

Preparing to leave the room, he listened for a few moments at the bedroom door, then boldly opened it and stepped out, retracing his steps toward his own room.

He was halfway down the corridor when Mrs. Victoria Winnett appeared at an intersecting corridor and moved toward Mason with stately dignity and a calm purpose.

“Were you looking for something, Mr. Mason?” she asked.

The lawyer’s smile was disarming. “Just getting acquainted with the house.”

Victoria Winnett was the conventional composite of a bygone era. There were pouches beneath her eyes, sagging lines to her face, but the painstakingly careful manner in which every strand of hair had been carefully coiffed, her face massaged, powdered, and rouged, indicated the emphasis she placed on appearance, and there was a stately dignity about her manner which, as Della Street subsequently remarked, reminded one of an ocean liner moving sedately up to its pier.

Had she carefully rehearsed her entrance and been grooming herself for hours to convey just the right impression of dignified rebuke, Mrs. Victoria Winnett would not have needed to change so much as a line of her appearance. “I think my son wanted to show you around,” she said as she fell into step at Mason’s side.

“Oh, he’s done that already,” Mason said with breezy informality. “I was just looking the place over.”

“You’re Mr. Perry Mason, the lawyer, aren’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“I had gathered from what I read about your cases that you specialize mostly in trial work.”

“I do.”

“Murder trials, do you not?”

“Oh, I handle lots of other cases. The murder cases get the most publicity.”

“I see,” she said in the tone of one who doesn’t see at all.

“Nice place you have here,” the lawyer went on. “I am very much interested in that observation cubicle on top of the house.”

“It was my husband’s idea. He liked to sit up there. Didn’t I hear the swallows crying out there?”

“I thought I heard them too,” Mason said.

She looked at him sharply. “We try to keep them from nesting here, but occasionally the gardener fails to see a nest until it is completed. Then we don’t disturb the nest until after the young birds have hatched. They’re noisy and talkative. You can hear them quite early in the mornings. I trust they won’t disturb you. Are you a sound sleeper, Mr. Mason?”

They had paused at the head of the stairs. Mrs. Winnett apparently did not intend to go down, so Mason, standing poised on the upper stair tread, used strategy to terminate the interview.

“My friend, Drake, is looking over the horses, and if you’ll pardon me I’ll run down and join him.”

He flashed her a smile and ran swiftly down the stairs, leaving her standing there, for the moment nonplussed at the manner in which the lawyer had so abruptly forestalled further questions.

In the patio, Della Street caught Perry Mason’s eye, gave him a significant signal and moved casually over to the driveway where she climbed into the car and sat down.

Mason walked over. “I think Paul Drake has something,” he said. “I’m going down and look him up. He’s just coming in on the bridle path. What have you got?”

“I can tell you something about the nurse, chief.”

“What?”

“In the first place, if a woman’s intuition counts for anything, she’s in love with the major — one of those hopeless affairs where she worships him from a distance. In the second place, I think she has a gambling habit of some sort.”

“Races?”

“I don’t know. I was up in the cupola just after you were. There was a pad of paper in the drawer of the little table up there. At first it looked completely blank. Then I tilted it so the light struck it at an angle and I could see that someone had written on the top sheet with a fairly hard pencil so it had made an imprint on the sheet under it. Then the top sheet had been torn off.”

“Good girl! What was on the sheet of paper? I take it something significant.”

“Evidently some gambling figures. I won’t bother to show you the original at this time, but here’s a copy that I worked out. It reads like this: These numbers on the first line, then down below that, led; then down below that a space and 5″5936; down below that 6″8102; down below that 7″9835; down below that 8″5280; down below that 9″2640; down below that 10″1320.”

“Anything else?” Mason asked.

“Then a line and below the line, the figure 49″37817. That looks like some sort of a lottery to me. I learned Mrs. Winnett has been up in the cupola lately, and since she’d hardly be a gambler, I assume the nurse must have written down the figures.”

Mason said thoughtfully, “Notice the last three numbers, Della, 5280, 2640, 1320. Does that sequence mean something to you?”

“No, why?”

Mason said, “5280 feet in a mile.”

“Oh, yes, I get that.”

“The next number, 2640 feet is a half mile, and the last number, 1320 feet, is a quarter mile.”

“Oh, yes, I see now. Then that double mark means inches, doesn’t it?”

“It’s an abbreviation of inches, yes. What does this nurse seem like, Della? Remember I only barely met her.”

“Despite her muddy complexion, straight hair and glasses, her eyes are really beautiful. You should see them light up when the major’s name comes up. My own opinion is this nurse could be good-looking. Then Mrs. Winnett would fire her. So she keeps herself looking plain and unattractive so she can be near the major, whom she loves with a hopeless, helpless, unrequited passion.”

“Look here,” Mason said, “if you’ve noticed that within an hour and a half, how about Mrs. Victoria Winnett? Doesn’t she know?”