The Case of the Crimson Kiss

Chapter three

When Aunt Louise answered the buzzer, Della Street said, “Mrs. Marlow, this is Perry Mason. This is ‘Aunt Louise,’ chief. She’s an old friend from my home town.”

Louise Marlow gave the famous lawyer her hand and a smile. She kissed Della and said, “You haven’t changed a bit, Della. Come on in. There’s a mess here. I can’t afford to have a word get in the newspapers. We had to get this sawbones. Now, how do we keep him from blabbing?”

“What does the doctor say?” Mason asked.

“He’s working like a house afire. Anita is conscious. Fay is going to pull through all right. Another hour and it would have been too late for her.”

“What happened?” Mason asked.

“Someone dumped sleeping medicine in the powdered chocolate, or else in the sugar.”

“Any suspicions?” Mason asked.

“Fay was marrying Dane Grover. I gather from her letters he’s a wealthy but shy young man who had one bad experience with a jane years ago and had turned bitter and disillusioned, or thought he had. A cynic at twenty-six! Baloney!”

Mason smiled.

“I got here around one o’clock, I guess. Fay had sent me a key. The place was closed tight as a miser’s purse. I used the key. As soon as I switched on the light and looked at Fay’s face, I knew that something was wrong, the color of it and the way she was breathing. I tried to wake her up and couldn’t. I finally shook some sense into Anita. She said the chocolate did it. Then I called Della. That’s just about all I know about it.”

“The cups they drank the chocolate from?” Mason asked. “Where are they?”

“On the kitchen sink — unwashed.”

“We may need them for evidence,” Mason said.

“Evidence, my eye!” Louise Marlow snorted. “I don’t want the police in on this. You can imagine what’ll happen if some sob sister spills a lot of printer’s ink about a bride-to-be trying to kill herself on the eve of the wedding.”

“Let’s take a look around,” Mason said.

The lawyer moved about the apartment, trying to reconstruct what had happened.

Louise Marlow followed, acting as guide, and Della Street from time to time gave the benefit of a feminine suggestion.

Mason nodded, paused as he came to street coats thrown over the back of a chair, then again as he looked at the two purses.

“Which one is Fay Allison’s?” he asked.

“Heavens, I don’t know. We’ll have to find out,” Aunt Louise said.

Mason said, “I’ll let you two take the lead. Go through them carefully. See if you can find anything that would indicate whether anyone might have been in the apartment shortly before they started drinking the chocolate. Perhaps there’s a letter that will give us a clue, or a card or a note.”

The doctor, emerging from the bedroom, said, “I want to boil some water for another hypo.”

“How are they coming?” Mason asked, as Mrs. Marlow went to the kitchen.

“The brunette is all right,” the doctor said, “and I think the blonde will make it all right.”

“When can I question one of them in detail?”

The doctor shook his head. “I wouldn’t advise it. Not that it will hurt anything, but you might get thrown off the track. They are still groggy, and there’s some evidence that the brunette is rambling and contradictory in her statements. Give her another hour and you can get some facts. Right now she’s running around in circles.”

The doctor boiled water for his hypo and went back to the bedroom. Della Street moved over to Mason’s side and said in a low voice, “Here’s something I don’t understand, chief.”

“What?”

“Notice the keys to the apartment house are stamped with the numbers of the apartments. Both girls have keys to this apartment in their purses. Fay Allison also has a key stamped seven-oh-two. What would she be doing with the key to another apartment?”

Mason’s eyes narrowed for a moment in thoughtful speculation. “What does Aunt Louise say?”

“She doesn’t know. I was the one who searched Fay’s purse. She went through Anita’s.”

“Anything else to give a clue?”

“Not the slightest thing anywhere.”

Mason said, “Okay, I’m going to take a look at seven-oh-two. You’d better come along, Della.”

Mason made excuses to Louise Marlow. “We want to look around awhile on the outside,” he said. “We’ll be back in a few minutes.”

He and Della took the elevator to the seventh floor, walked down to apartment 702, and Mason pushed his thumb against the bell button.

They could hear the sound of the buzzer in the apartment, but there was no sound of answering motion such as would have been caused by sleepers stirring around.

Mason said, “It’s a chance we shouldn’t take, but I’m going to take a peek inside, just for luck.”

He fitted the key to the door, clicked back the lock, and gently opened the door.

The blazing lights of the living room streamed illumination out at them through the open door, showed the sprawled body on the floor, the drinking glass which had rolled from the dead fingers.

The door from an apartment across the hall jerked open. A young woman with disheveled hair, a bathrobe around her, said angrily, “After you’ve pressed a buzzer that long at this time of the night you should have sense enough to—”

“We have,” Mason interrupted, pulling Della Street into the apartment and kicking the door shut behind them with a quick jab of his heel.

Della Street, clinging to Mason’s arm, saw the sprawled figure on the floor, the crimson lipstick on the forehead. She looked at the overturned chair by the table, the glass which had rolled along the carpet, spilling part of its contents, and at the other empty glass standing on the table across from the overturned chair.

Her breathing was heavy and fast, as though she had been running, but she said nothing.

“Careful, Della, we mustn’t touch anything.”

“Who is he?”

“Apparently he’s People’s Exhibit A. Do you suppose the nosy dame in the opposite apartment is out of the hall by this time? We’ll have to take a chance anyway.” He wrapped his hand with his handkerchief, turned the knob on the inside of the door, and pulled it silently open.

The door of the apartment across the hall was closed.

Mason warned Della Street to silence with a gesture. They tiptoed out into the corridor, pulling the door closed behind them.

As the door clicked shut, the elevator came to a stop at the seventh floor. Three men and a woman came hurrying down the corridor directly toward them.

Mason’s voice was low, reassuring. “Perfectly casual, Della. Just friends departing from a late card game.”

They caught the curious glances of the four people, moved slightly to one side, then, after the quartet had passed, Mason took Della Street’s arm and said, “Don’t hurry, Della, take it easy.”

“Well,” Della Street said, “they’ll certainly know us if they ever see us again. The way that woman looked me over...”

“I know,” Mason said, “but we’ll hope that... oh, oh!”

“What is it?”

“They’re going to seven-oh-two!”

The four paused in front of the door. One of the men pressed the buzzer button.

Almost immediately the door of the opposite apartment jerked open. The woman with the bathrobe shrilled, “I’m suffering from insomnia. I’ve been trying to sleep, and this—”

She broke off as she saw the strangers.

The man who had been pressing the button grinned and said in a booming voice which carried well down the corridor, “We’re sorry, ma’am. I only just gave him one short buzz.”

“Well, the other people who went in just before you made enough commotion.”

“Other people in here?” the man asked, hesitated a moment, then went on. “Well, we won’t bother him if he’s got company.”

Mason pulled Della Street into the elevator, pulled the door shut, and pushed the button for the lobby.

“What in the world do we do now?” Della Street asked.

“Now,” Mason said, his voice sharp-edged with disappointment, “we ring police headquarters and report a possible homicide. It’s the only thing we can do. The woman only saw two people she can’t identify going in, but that quartet will eventually identify us as going out.”

There was a phone booth in the lobby. Mason dropped in a coin, dialed police headquarters, and reported that he had found a corpse in apartment 702 under circumstances indicating probable homicide. He had, he said, touched nothing but had backed right out and called the police.

While Mason was in the phone booth, the four people emerged from the elevator. There was a distinct aroma of alcohol as they pushed their way toward the door. The woman, catching sight of Della Street standing beside the phone booth, favored her with a feminine appraisal which swept from head to foot and missed no smallest detail.

Mason called Louise Marlow in apartment 604. “I think you’d better have the doctor take his patients to a sanitarium where they can have complete quiet,” he said.

“He seems to think they’re doing all right here.”

“I distrust doctors who seem to think,” Mason said. “I would suggest a sanitarium immediately, and complete quiet.”

Louise Marlow was silent for a full three seconds.

“Are you there?” Mason asked.

“I’m here,” she said. “I’m just trying to get the sketch.”

“I think the patients should have complete quiet,” Mason said.

“Damn it,” Louise Marlow sputtered. “When you said it the first time I missed it. The second time I got it. You don’t have to let your needle get stuck on the record! I was just trying to figure it out.”

Mason heard her slam up the phone at the other end of the line.

Mason grinned and hung up the phone. Then he took the key to 702 from his pocket, dropped it in an envelope, addressed the envelope to his office, stamped it, and dropped it in the mailbox by the elevator.

Outside, the four people in the car were having something of an argument. Apparently there was some sharp difference of opinion as to what action was to be taken next, but as a siren sounded they reached a sudden unanimity of decision. They were starting the car when the police car pulled in to the curb. The red beam of the police spotlight pilloried them. The siren blasted a peremptory summons.

The driver of the car looked behind him, then stepped on the gas.

The police car shot away in angry pursuit, and three minutes later a chastened quartet swung their car back to a stop in front of the apartment house, the police car following them until the machine was safely parked at the curb. One of the radio officers walked over to the other car, took possession of the ignition keys, and ushered the four people up to the door of the apartment house.

Mason hurried across the lobby to open the locked door.

The officer said, “I’m looking for a man who reported a body.”

“That’s right. I did. My name’s Mason. The body’s in seven-oh-two.”

“A body!” the woman screamed.

“Shut up,” the radio officer said.

“But we know the... why he told you we’d been visiting in seven-oh-two... we...”

“Yeah, you said you’d been visiting a friend in seven-oh-two, name of Carver Clements. How was he when you left him?”

There was an awkward silence, then the woman said, “We really didn’t get in. We just went to the door. The woman across the way said he had company, so we left.”

“Said he had company?”

“That’s right. But I think the company had left. It was these two here.”

“We’ll go take a look,” the officer said. “Come on.”