Erle Gardner - The Case of the Borrowed Brunette

“Prove that I harbored one,” Mason challenged. “Prove it beyond all reasonable doubt in front of a jury. And the next time, try to be a little more cooperative.” And he terminated the conversation by slamming up the receiver.

He found Della Street watching him apprehensively.

“What happened, Chief?”

“Probably a stroke of luck,” Mason said. “Evidently one of the radio officers who questioned Eva Martell yesterday was cruising around and happened to spot her in a taxicab. She’d made the mistake of not wanting to tell the driver to go directly to police headquarters — probably because she was a little sensitive. She told him what streets to take, evidently intending to pay him off a block or so from headquarters and walk the rest of the way. A matter of silly pride.”

“But surely Gulling will understand that?”

“Gulling understands nothing except the letter of die law,” Mason said. “And he’s particularly anxious to put me in the position of being an accessory after the fact. His position will doubtless be that I take all technical advantage of the law and that there is no reason why the district attorney’s office shouldn’t do the same.”

“You mean they’ll actually charge you with something?”

“They may. Anyhow, they’ll hold it over my head. They can’t charge me with anything unless they can get some evidence to connect me with harboring Eva Martell.”

“What’s Eva doing?”

“Apparently she is following my instructions and saying nothing to anyone, beyond stating to the officer who arrested her that she was on her way to police headquarters to surrender.”

“Won’t they be able to make Mae Bagley talk?”

“She is talking,” Mason said with a grin. “She’s telling them that she never saw Eva Martell in her life, much less rented her a room!”

“But that’s perjury, isn’t it?”

“Not unless she makes the statement under oath,” Mason replied. “They’ll have to establish that it’s perjury beyond all reasonable doubt, in front of a jury. And there’s a rather technical point about perjury that Mr. Gulling seems to have overlooked.”

“What’s that?”

“Perjury must be established by the testimony of two witnesses.”

“Do you suppose Mae Bagley knows that, Chief?”

There was a twinkle in Mason’s eye. “She may know something about the law of perjury... ”

“What was she charged with when you defended her and got her off, Chief?”

Mason lit a cigarette and closed one eye in a slow wink.

“Perjury,” he said.

Monday morning’s paper was interesting Perry Mason a good deal. Sitting in his office, he had it spread on the desk before him, and he was carefully reading the long and startlingly headlined story on the front page. It ran:

Developments in connection with the murder of Robert Dover Hines were whizzing along with bewildering rapidity over the week end. Perry Mason, the noted criminal lawyer whose successes have made his name almost a household word, has announced that he is defending both Adelle Winters and Eva Martell. The retort of the district attorney’s office to this was to rush Miss Mae Bagley, a rooming-house manager, before a night session of the Grand Jury. The police claim that on the night of the murder Perry Mason managed to whisk Eva Martell out from under their noses and keep her in concealment until after she had been thoroughly coached by someone in what to say, or rather in what not to say.

Mae Bagley, it is understood, cheerfully told the Grand Jury all that she didn’t know. She was, she insisted, running a respectable rooming house and conforming with all the legal requirements. She had never seen Eva Martell in her life, much less rented her a room.

Confronted with the fact that the driver of the taxi-cab in which Eva Martell was riding says that he was summoned to the rooming house operated by Mae Bagley and that he there picked up Eva Martell who was riding in his cab when police made the arrest, Miss Bagley has a whole fistful of explanations, starting with the simple statement that the taxi driver is mistaken. She points out that there are several rooming houses in the immediate vicinity, and that anyone can easily summon a taxi to go to a certain address and then be standing there in the doorway when it drives up, even if that isn’t where he actually lives. She ventured a wager with the Grand Jury that she herself could summon a taxi-cab to call for her at the home of the assistant district attorney, could appear at his front door at the exact moment the taxicab arrived, and could — by walking down to the cab and drawing on her gloves as she left the door — create in the driver’s mind the impression that she had stayed there all night — an experience which, Mae Bagley forcefully pointed out, she had no intention of enjoying.

It was rumored that her testimony brought smiles to the faces of many of the grand jurors, and that Harry Gulling, who has been in charge of mapping strategy in the case for the D.A.’s office, was plainly nettled at the answers he received. Threats of a prosecution for perjury are said to have been repeatedly made without having the slightest effect on the witness.

So far as the case against the two principal defendants is concerned, Gulling points out dryly that, according to Eva Martell’s sworn statement, she was with Adelle Winters every minute of the day on which the shooting concededly occurred. Robert Hines was killed, Gulling points out, with a gun concededly owned by Adelle Winters — a gun which, according to an eye-witness, Mrs. Winters endeavored to conceal in a garbage pail at a downtown hotel shortly after the shooting. At the time of her arrest, she was found to have Hines’s wallet on her person, and the murder concededly was committed in an apartment occupied at the time by Adelle Winters. If, Gulling points out, Perry Mason can find some explanation for those facts consistent with the innocence of his clients, “we might,” to quote the assistant district attorney, “just as well throw the law books away, give Perry Mason the keys to the jail, and provide his clients with hunting licenses good for at least one victim a day.”

There is no secret among courthouse attaches that this is something of a grudge fight of long standing. Gulling, who is recognized by those who know their way around as the mainspring in actuating strategy in the district attorney’s office, is out to get Perry Mason. While Gulling seldom appears in court, he is reputed among attorneys to have a keen, methodical mind and an encyclopedic knowledge of the law.

Both prosecution and defense have signified their desire to have an early trial, and it is understood that a date left open by the continuance of another case has been tentatively suggested by Gulling, who is particularly anxious to get the murder cases disposed of so that an attempt to prosecute Perry Mason will have no legal obstacles to hurdle. It has been suggested further

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Mason didn’t bother to turn to the inside page. He folded the paper, tossed it to one side, and said to Della Street, “Della, I have a letter I want you to write.”

She whipped open her notebook and held her pencil ready.

“This letter,” Mason instructed her, “is not to be typed. It must be written in longhand on a delicately perfumed sheet of stationery. It will read: ‘Dear Mr. Mason. I hope you won’t think I did wrong in telling the Grand Jury I had never seen Eva Martell in my life. Things happened so fast I didn’t have any time to get in touch with you and wasn’t sure just what I should do under the circumstances. However, I remembered that when I last heard from you, you told me that you wanted me to put her in a room where— But I guess I’d better say this in our code.’ ”