Erle Gardner - The Case of the Baited Hook

The waiter brought their drinks.

Mason said, “Look here. You weren’t just playing a hunch on that trust fund business. You’ve been sticking up for Peltham. You’re in communication with him. You have the most implicit faith in him. That means that — well, you know what it means.”

“What does it mean?” she asked.

Mason said, “You may mask your face, but you can’t mask your feelings.”

She twisted the stem of her glass, rotating it by a slow motion of the thumb and forefinger while she kept her eyes from his. “I don’t think I’m going to make any answer to that,” she said.

“You mean you don’t understand me?”

“N-n-no. Not exactly that, but I’d want you to be very definite before I — before I said anything at all.”

Mason tossed off his drink, pulled a bill from his pocket, and dropped it on the table. “Now listen,” he said, “we’ve played ring-around-the-rosy and button-button-who’s-got-the-button until I’m sick of it. You can either talk to me now and talk to me frankly and fairly, or I’ll walk out, and you can chase me around.”

“But why should I want to chase you around, Mr. Mason? It’s the other way around. You were following me.”

“Forget it,” Mason said. “I’m tired of playing horse. Do you want me to walk out, or don’t you?”

Her eyes showed a quick flash of some baffling expression. “Mr. Mason,” she said, with feeling, “if you’d get up from this table, walk out of that door, and not ask me any more questions, I’d think — I’d think it was one of the biggest breaks I’d ever had in my whole life.”

Without a word, Mason pushed back his chair, picked up his hat, and started for the door. He turned midway to glance back at her surprised features and said, “You know where my office is,” — then walked out and left her.

Della Street looked up as Mason unlocked the door of his private office and came striding into the room.

“Oh — oh,” she said. “Was it as bad as all that?”

“Worse,” Mason told her, taking off his hat and throwing it on a chair. “I’m getting fed up with things. I’ve bought a pig in a poke, and it’s the last time.”

“But Paul Drake telephoned that you’d picked her up, and that everything seemed all right.”

“Drake,” Mason said, “is a damn poor judge of feminine character. I don’t know but what I’m not as bad… When did Drake telephone?”

“A few minutes ago. He said he guessed there was no need for him to keep a shadow on the woman, but he’d done it just on general principles, that she was Adelle Hastings, that you’d left her in a cocktail lounge, that she’d gone out right after you had left — within a matter of minutes — and had gone straight to her apartment. If you’ll give me the other half of that ten thousand dollars, Chief, I’ll take it down to the bank and make a deposit.”

Mason laughed mirthlessly.

“What’s the matter? Haven’t you got it?”

“No.”

“Didn’t she have it?”

“She must have it,” Mason said, “and she’s taking me for a ride to the tune of ten grand.”

“How do you figure?”

Mason spread out his hands in a gesture of resignation. “A sucker,” he said. “Just a plain pushover. I was so damn conscientious that I stuck my finger in the porridge and started stirring. Now I’ve stirred out all the lumps, and haven’t anything to show for it except a burned finger.”

“You mean she isn’t going to give you the other half of that bill?”

“Why should she? Peltham is satisfied, and she’s satisfied. Things are moving fine. She has an iron-clad alibi for Tuesday morning. At least, she says she has, and I give her credit for being smart enough to be telling the truth. If she fixed up an alibi, she fixed up a good one.

“I’ve prodded Holcomb into the position of bringing pressure to bear all along the line, to fix the time of that murder as immediately after noon on Tuesday. I have the smaller piece of that ten-thousand-dollar bill. I can’t do anything with it until I get the other half… If I’m a big enough sap to work for nothing, why should anyone pay me for it?”

She said thoughtfully, “It does look that way, doesn’t it?”

He nodded moodily. “Anything else?” he asked.

“Drake says his men shadowed Abigail Tump, that she led them to the man he thinks is the secretary for the orphan asylum you want. He also picked up a copy of the ad which was left in the Contractor’s Journal by Miss Hastings.”

“What does the ad say?” Mason asked, dropping into his big swivel chair, elevating his feet to the desk, and taking a cigarette from the office humidor.

Della Street consulted her shorthand notebook and read, “ ‘Have nothing to add to situation. Granting interview this time would be unwise. You’re doing fine. P.’ ”

Mason said, “That’s rubbing it in… I’m doing fine, am I? Yes, Della. Take this down. Type it out and rush it over to the Contractor’s Journal. Have them carry it in their earliest possible issue: ‘P. I don’t like to contract for work without blueprints. Arrange to deliver detailed plans and specifications or anticipate serious defects in finished structure.’ Now read that back to me, Della.”

She read it back to him.

Mason nodded grimly. “Okay,” he said.

She looked at him with eyes that showed a trace of concern. “Wouldn’t it be better, Chief, to sit tight now and let things develop?”

“I’m not built that way,” he said. “It would probably be the prudent thing to do. In any event, it would be the conventional thing to do, but you never get far being prudent and conventional. Right now, this case is wide open. If I sit back and wait, it’ll crystallize against the client I’ll eventually have to represent.”

“But if you keep doing things which are advantageous to that client, you’ll never be paid,” she pointed out.

Mason said, “From now on the things I’m going to do will make their hair stand up… Take that ad down to the Contractor’s Journal and leave word in Drake’s office that he’s to come in here as soon as he gets back to the office… That little devil, Adelle Hastings, figures she can trump my aces and make me like it.”

“How can you stop her playing it that way, Chief, as long as you keep working on the case?”

Mason grinned, but without humor. “I’m going to make it no-trumps,” he said.

Della Street adjusted her hat in front of the office mirror. “Well,” she observed, “there’s no use telling you to be careful.”

“Whoever got anything in life by being careful?” Mason retorted. “Every time you stop to figure what the other fellow’s going to do, you unconsciously figure what you’d do in his place. The result is that you’re not fighting him, but yourself. You always come to a stalemate. Every time you think of a move, you think of a perfect defense.

“The best fighters don’t worry about what the other man may do. And if they keep things moving fast enough, the other man is too busy to do much thinking.”

“Something tells me,” Della Street grinned, as she made for the door, “that things are going to move fast.”

Paul Drake’s voice from the corridor said, cheerfully, “Against the light, your legs are swell, Della. They’d get by in front of any window.”

“Sometime when you’re not too busy, tell Perry all about them, will you, Paul?”

Drake, in a rare good humor, circled Della Street and edged in at the open door. “Gosh, Perry,” he said, “that was a slick stunt you pulled with that purse. I thought I’d die laughing. When she called the officer and said you were annoying her, I thought I’d have to appear in the police court to give you a good character reference.”