The Case of the Caretaker's Cat

Chapter 6

There was something suggestive of a huge bear about Hamilton Burger, the district attorney. He was broad of shoulders, thick of neck, and, when he moved, his arms had that peculiar swinging rhythm which speaks for a network of perfectly coordinated muscles rippling under the skin.

"You know, Mason," he said, "I'm anxious to cooperate with you whenever cooperation is possible. I've told you before, and I'll tell you again, that I've a horror of prosecuting an innocent man; but I'll also tell you that I don't like to have anyone use me for a cat'spaw."

Mason sat silent. Paul Drake, sprawled in a chair, his long legs thrust out in front of him, kept his glassy eyes fixed on the toes of his shoes, and managed to look bored.

Burger started pacing the floor, his manner nervous. He flung his head around in a half turn as a bear might sniff the wind, and said, "You're a good lawyer, Mason."

Perry Mason sat quiet.

Burger pivoted on his heel, started walking in the other direction. He said, flinging the words over his shoulder, "But you're a better detective than you are a lawyer. When you turn your mind to the solution of a crime, you ferret out the truth. That doesn't keep you from defending guilty clients."

Mason said nothing.

Burger took one more turn; then stopped abruptly, swung to face Mason, leveled his forefinger and said, "If the people in my office thought that I was going to act on information you had given me, they'd think you were making a cat'spaw of me."

"That," Mason retorted, "is the reason I came to you personally instead of going to your assistants. Here's an opportunity for you to clean up something, and prove that what appeared to be an accidental death was in fact a murder. I'm not asking favors. I'm giving you an opportunity. You can take it or leave it. I'm interested in this thing because of a cat; and if you want to know, I'm making exactly ten dollars as a fee."

Burger pulled a cigar from his waistcoat pocket, tore at the end of it with his teeth, scraped a match along the bricks of the fireplace, and puffed the cigar into smoke. He sighed and said, "All right, Dr. Jason happens to be visiting me this evening. I'm going to call him in. If the thing sounds reasonable to him, we're going to make a whirlwind investigation. I'll know whether I want to go ahead or run for cover by the time the publicity breaks."

Perry Mason lit a cigarette.

"Excuse me just a moment," Burger said. "I'll call Dr. Jason, and I'll telephone Tom Glassman, my chief investigator, and have him come up right away."

As the door closed behind the district attorney, Paul Drake rolled his expressionless eyes toward Perry Mason. The detective's face was wearing its habitual expression of droll humor. "I notice you didn't tell him anything about the peculiar and sudden rise to affluence of your client, Charles Ashton."

"I'm only concerned with reporting such facts as may point to a murder," Mason remarked.

Drake turned his eyes back to stare at his toes.

"If I were a district attorney, I'm not so certain that I'd play along with you, Perry," he remarked.

"Whenever a man plays ball with me, he gets a square deal," Mason insisted.

"Yeah, but God help him if he ever tries to steal second," Drake said lugubriously.

The door of the room opened and Dr. Jason, a tall, rather thin man with brown eyes which were unusually piercing, surveyed the two men.

"Good evening, Mason," he said. "I don't think I know Mr. Drake."

Drake slowly doubled up his knees, arose from the chair, extended a languid hand.

"Glad to know you, Doctor," he said. "I've heard a lot about you from Perry Mason. I always remembered what he said about you when you'd been examining one of his clients on a sanity test."

"Indeed?" Dr. Jason inquired.

"Mason said that when you started worming your way into a man's consciousness, you were as persistent as the head of a wild oat working up a man's sleeve."

Dr. Jason laughed. "I only wish he'd say that publicly. It would be the best advertisement I could have. It doesn't exactly coincide with what he said about me to the jury in his last case."

District Attorney Burger, indicating chairs, puffed nervously on his cigar. "Doctor," he said, "I have a problem. A house burns, a man's body is found. Apparently he has burned to death in his bed. There was no suggestion of anything sinister in that death. Now, then, witnesses appear who can testify that a man, who might have profited very materially by the death of this person, was in a garage, with a flexible tube running from the exhaust pipe of his automobile to a hole cut in the pipe of a hot air furnace which led to this man's room. The fire may well have been of incendiary origin. Is it possible that sufficient carbon monoxide gas could have been introduced into the room in this way to have brought about the man's death?"

"Quite readily possible," Dr. Jason admitted, his eyes shifting from Drake to Mason.

"The man would have died in his sleep?"

"It is very likely. Carbon monoxide is a very insidious poison. There are numerous instances of persons who have been working in closed garages where motor cars were running and who died without being able to reach the outer air."

"How could you tell if a person died of carbon monoxide poisoning?"

"There are several methods. One of the most usual is to notice the color of the blood. It is a bright, cherryred."

"And, if a person was burned to death, could you detect the presence of carbon monoxide?"

"Wait a minute," Dr. Jason said slowly. "You are overlooking something. If a person burnt to death, we would have every reason to expect that carbon monoxide would be present in his lungs. In fact, it might well be that the person had suffocated from monoxide incidental to the fire."

"In that case, Doctor, would it be possible to tell from an examination of the body whether the man had been murdered by this method before the house was fired?"

Dr. Jason's glittering eyes stared searchingly at Perry Mason. "How long before the fire was the monoxide introduced into this man's room by means of the automobile exhaust?"

"Probably two or three hours."

Dr. Jason nodded slowly. "I think," he said to Hamilton Burger, "that we could tell from an inspection of the body. It would, of course, depend somewhat upon the condition of the body after the fire. I would say that it would be quite possible to make this determination. Blisters, which are formed by heat when the tissues are able to react, usually vary greatly from evidences of heat applied after death."

"In other words, we should exhume the body?" Burger inquired.

Dr. Jason nodded.

Burger got to his feet with a peculiar lunging motion, as though about to charge some obstacle. "Well," he said, "if we're going to tackle this thing, we may as well make a good job of it. I'll get an order permitting us to exhume the body."