Эрл Гарднер - The Case of the Careless Kitten

He peered at them shrewdly through the upper part of his spectacles. “If anybody’d ask me,” he said, “looks as though you two was headed for Yuma on a marryin’ party.”

“Nobody asked you!” Della Street said, smiling.

Mason took another twenty-five cent piece from his pocket, slipped it under his plate.

“What’s that for?” the man asked.

“The idea,” Mason said, grinning. “Come on, Della. Let’s go.”

They raced through the streets to the building where Mason had his office. Paul Drake’s detective agency was on the same floor as the lawyer’s office but nearer the elevator. Mason opened the lighted door, looked in on the man who ran the office at night.

“The boss in yet?”

“Hello, Mr. Mason — no, he is taking this week off. I thought you knew.”

“If he should drop in, don’t mention me,” Mason grinned. “Just forget you saw me.”

They walked down the long, vacant corridor, their steps echoing hollowly against the walls. Dark doors on each side lettered with the names of business firms seemed like silent sentinels of dead business. The air in the hallway was musty and stale. Mason opened the door of his private office, switched on the lights. Della Street paused as he held the door open.

“That’s the elevator coming up again,” she said. “I’ll bet this is Paul Drake.”

Mason disappeared into the law library and closed the door. He could hear the steady rhythm of the approaching steps.

“It’s Paul, all right,” Della Street whispered from the other side of the door. “Nothing ever seems to change the tempo of that walk. He’s not stopping at his office.”

There was a soft knock on the door into the corridor. Della Street opened it a crack. Drake pushed it open the rest of the way, stalked in, slammed the door behind him. He looked at Della with slightly protruding eyes which held no hint of expression. Then he smiled sardonically. Tall, somewhat stooped, he had the manner of a professional undertaker making a midnight round of the mortuary.

“Hello, kid,” he said.

“Hello, Paul.” Della’s voice was uncertain.

“That was a good act. I didn’t know you had it in you.” He crossed swiftly to the door concealing Perry Mason and flung it open. “Come out of there, you cheap shyster! I’ll teach you to try the badger game on me.”

Mason came out, grinning. “I had a hunch you didn’t fall for it, but I didn’t say anything.”

There was a wail from Della Street. “You played up and led me on and pretended you thought I was serious, and all the time you were laughing at me!”

“Shucks, Della, I was admiring you. I wasn’t laughing at you.” His slow drawl was expressive, pungent. “I just know you too well.”

“Why did you come, then?” she demanded, pointing at him.

Paul Drake’s head drew in like a turtle’s, then lunged forward and snapped at the tinted red fingernail a few inches away from his face.

“I figured Perry needed me, and I guess I’ve had enough vacation. I was bored stiff,” he confessed, with his peculiar husky chuckle.

“Get this woman off my neck, Perry, and let’s get to work.”

He squirmed his way into his favorite, crossways position in the big, overstuffed leather chair. “What’s the excitement?”

For ten minutes Mason talked rapidly. Drake listened with his eyes closed.

“That’s the picture,” Mason wound up.

“Okay. What do I do?”

“Find out everything you can about Leech. Find out anything you can about all the members of the family, particularly what they’ve done since the hue and cry over Franklin’s disappearance died down.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes. This man who telephoned Helen Kendal seems to have identified himself unmistakably as Franklin Shore, but in a case of this sort, you can’t overlook the possibility of an impostor. Now, this man Leech has either been in contact with Franklin Shore or else trying to slip over a fast one. Here’s a number,” Mason went on, opening up his notebook and tearing out a sheet of paper.

“Car license?” Drake asked.

“No. Laundry mark. Laundry mark on a handkerchief that was tied around some personal stuff that seems to have belonged to Shore. It was on the seat of the car beside Leech. Leech evidently brought them along to show that he actually was acting as intermediary for Shore.”

“Why the intermediary?”

“You’ve got me. Maybe Shore didn’t want to come back until he’d tossed his hat in the door first.”

“Would it have been kicked out?”

“Hard.”

Drake gave a low whistle. “Like that, eh?”

Mason nodded.

“Tragg know you’ve got this laundry mark?” Drake asked.

“I don’t think so. I fumbled around and pretended to be interested in the watch. That laundry mark struck me as being peculiar, Paul. I haven’t seen laundry marks inked on the hems of handkerchiefs for some time. Most laundries don’t do it any more. We should be able to trace Franklin Shore from that laundry mark.”

“Anything else?”

“That Castle Gate Hotel seems to be...”

“I know the dump,” Drake interrupted. “Bunch of promoters hang out there. Slick stock men. Phony mining-company stuff. Get-rich-quick oil businesses and that sort of thing. They don’t promote their rackets from the hotel, but use the Castle Gate as a place to hibernate when things go sour. If they start hitting the jackpot, they move into swanky hotels and apartments and put on the dog. If the police don’t get anything on them and the racket pays off, they move into the big-time. If the police do get something on them, they go to San Quentin. But when a racket doesn’t pay off, and the police haven’t anything on them, they sneak back to the Castle Gate to make contacts with each other and lie low until the beef has passed.”

“Okay,” Mason said. “Now, here’s another angle. Look back in the newspapers in 1932 and you’ll find they published a list of checks which had cleared through Franklin Shore’s account within a few days of his disappearance. You can be sure the police have dug up everything they could find out about those checks as of 1932. I want you to make a fresh investigation as of 1942.”

“Anything else?” Drake asked, jotting down notes in a leather-backed, loose-leaf notebook.

“As an incidental development,” Mason said, “a kitten was poisoned out at Matilda Shore’s house. I think Tragg will be covering all the drugstores looking for poison purchases, and it won’t do any good for us to trail along behind the police. They have the organization and the authority. They’d be bound to get the facts before we could. But you might bear in mind the poison angle.”

“What’s the kitten got to do with it?” Drake asked.

“I don’t know, but Matilda Shore was fed poison from some source — apparently the same sort of poison that was used on the kitten. There’s a chap by the name of Komo who works as houseboy. There’s some question whether he’s Japanese or Korean. Tragg has a letter and map which was mailed, special delivery, around six-thirty from a Hollywood branch post office. It sounds very Japanesy — almost too Japanesy. However, you can’t tell a thing by that. Komo might have written it, or it may have been someone who thought Komo, because of his nationality, would make a good bait for the police to snap at. You can probably get a photostatic copy of that letter. Tragg will be searching for typewriters which could have written it, and will have had an expert check it over. You can probably find out from one of the newspaper boys what has been reported by this expert — the make and model of typewriter it was written on. It looked to me like a portable owned by someone who didn’t do any serious typewriting, quite probably a man who’s owned the machine for sometime.”