Эрл Гарднер - The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom

“We have an understanding that people going to the Drake Detective Agency don’t register,” the janitor explained. “They keep open twenty-four hours a day, you know.”

Mason marked down his own checking out time, said to Virginia Colfax, “You certainly do have a fast mind, a ready wit and a nimble tongue.”

“Thank you,” she said frigidly.

The elevator stopped at the lobby floor. She swept out, with her chin in the air, and Mason followed.

At the door of the building she stood for a moment with the wind from the approaching shower catching her hair, blowing it back from her ears. The storm was now measurably closer and the occasional rumble of thunder at intervals drowned out the noises of the city street.

She suddenly turned and put her hand on his arm. “I want you to know one thing,” she said.

“What?” Mason asked.

She said, “I’m grateful to you for being so decent about everything.”

Mason raised his eyebrows.

And with that, she swung her arm up from her side and slapped his face so hard that the sound of her open palm attracted the attention of a group of people who had just emerged from the cocktail lounge a couple of doors down the street.

As Mason stood for a disconcerted moment, she sprinted across the sidewalk, jerked open the door of a waiting taxi and jumped inside.

“Hey!” Mason shouted to the cab driver, “hold that cab!” and started across the sidewalk.

A bull-necked man, with the build of a stevedore and the tailored suit of a business executive, grabbed Mason’s coattail. “None of that, buddy!” he said.

Mason whirled on him. “Take your hands off me!”

The man hung on, regarding him with a grin. “It’s no dice, buddy, she doesn’t like you.”

The taxi shot out from the curb and into traffic.

Mason said to the heavy set man, “Let go of that coat or I’ll break your jaw.”

There was something in his eyes which caused the man to fall back.

“Now wait a minute, buddy,” the man said, “you can see that the dame doesn’t want...”

Mason turned toward the curb, looked up and down the street for a cab. There was none in sight.

He turned back toward the big man. “All right,” he said, his face white with wrath, “you’ve played hero in front of your party. I suppose you used to be a great boxer in the good old college days back in nineteen seven-teen. If it’s any satisfaction to you, your interference has caused a lot of legal complications your mind is too dumb to comprehend. Now get your damn fat face out of my way or I’ll push it in!”

The man, abashed, fell back before Mason’s blazing fury.

The lawyer pushed contemptuously past him, started back to the office, changed his mind, walked around the corner of the building to the entrance of the alley, then paced down the alley, moving slowly, searching carefully, exploring every foot of the pavement.

There was no trace of either a revolver or flashlight.

Mason walked back to the entrance of the office building, signed the register once more, was taken up to his own floor and stepped into the office of the Drake Detective Agency.

“Paul Drake in?” he asked the girl at the desk.

She shook her head.

Mason said, “I’ve got a job for him. No great rush about it. Start him on it tomorrow morning. I want to find out something about the background of the Garvin Mining, Exploration and Development Company. I want to know whether a girl by the name of Virginia Colfax is employed there, and I want to know something about the Garvin who runs the outfit. Tell Paul not to spend too much time on it, but to get me the background and let me know when he has something to report.”

The girl nodded, and Mason walked on down the corridor to his office, where he again tackled the legal problem of trying to determine whether a statement could be considered as entirely extraneous and inadmissible as hearsay, or whether it could be classed as a part of the res gestae and therefore admissible as an exception to the hearsay evidence rule.

The lights in the adjoining buildings winked out one by one, until all the other office buildings were dark. Mason, engrossed in his subject, went on collecting case after case, showing the fine line of distinction between hearsay and res gestae.

A vague uneasiness intruded upon his concentration. With his eyes absorbed by the lawbooks, a faint but unfamiliar scent insisted upon reminding him of his feminine intruder.

At length he flung down his book and looked around. There on the floor was a handkerchief grimed with dirt that might have come off a fire escape.

The handkerchief held the scent of a distinctive perfume and was neatly embroidered with the letter “V.”

At ten o’clock the next morning Perry Mason, appearing before the State Supreme Court, sitting in bank, was able, after a masterful thirty-minute argument bristling with authorities, to convince the high tribunal that the statement which had been received in evidence by the lower court was a part of the res gestae, and the Court thereupon affirmed a judgment previously awarded in the lower court to one of Perry Mason’s clients.

Mason took a taxicab to his office, and shortly after eleven o’clock opened the door of his private office.

Della Street, his private secretary, glanced up from her desk, smiled a greeting, and said, “How did you come out, chief?”

“On top.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

“You look tired.”

“I was up most of the night.”

Della Street smiled.

“Why the smile?” Mason asked.

“Have you, by any chance, seen the newspaper?”

“Yes, I saw the morning newspaper and...”

“I’m referring to the early edition of the afternoon newspaper,” Della Street said. “You might like to see the Gossip Column.”

“Why?” he asked.

She raised two forefingers, rubbing one across the other and said, mockingly, “Naughty, naughty, chief.”

“Now what?” he asked.

Della Street placed a folded newspaper on his desk.

Mason noticed a marked section in the Gossip Column on the inside page:

What prominent lawyer, whose name has become almost a byword because of his uncanny skill in defending persons accused of crime, received the mitten in front of his office building last night? Who was the mysterious blonde spitfire who swung one from the hip and left the astonished lawyer groggy while she sprinted across to a taxicab? It must have been someone in whom the attorney had a more than ordinary interest, because only the physical restraint of an athletic bystander prevented the lawyer from dashing across the sidewalk to attempt forcible entry and detainer.

And what was this lawyer looking for in the alley? Did the blonde pitch something out of his office window?

And the party seemed so congenial until the haymaker.

This handsome lawyer is the secret of many a heartbreak on the part of yearning debutantes who wish he would give them a tumble instead of being so engrossed in his law business. — Or is it that his office, with its competent employees, seems so attractive that he prefers the business environment to that of the socialites?

In any event, one young woman in this city has registered her emphatic disapproval.

Tut, tut, Mr. M!

Mason’s face darkened as he read the column. “Damn snooping buzzard!” he said. “Why do newspapers have to employ people to snoop around in gutters?”

“And alleys,” Della Street said.

“And alleys,” Mason amended. “How the devil do you suppose he got the information?”

“You forget that you’re pretty well known now,” she said. “Who was the athletic stranger?”